One radio commentator, in the thick of the judicial flurry on Monday, commented icily that some Republicans seemed to be saying that there was no national right to vote in presidential elections, that the logic of the position of Justice Scalia was as simple as that if the legislature of the state of Florida ruled that no one was qualified to vote for president, so would it be. The shorthand for this form of reductionism in argument is: Who says A, must say B. I.e., any man who holds that the legislature is supreme on the question of elections to federal office must commit himself to saying that the legislature is entitled simply to eliminate the presidential ballot.

The most obvious objection to this kind of formal reasoning is that democratic resistance would not permit it. If Tallahassee were to adopt (per impossibile) any such position, what would happen to the people who sit in Tallahassee? Exactly.

The Constitution requires that member states be governed by representative elections. There are congressional enactments that have survived judicial scrutiny that guarantee that states shall not discriminate on the basis of race or sex or ethnic origin. If a state were to restrict the vote in such a way as the commentator imagines, it is quickly predictable that the composition of its legislature would change at the next election, assuming that impeachment proceedings hadn't, in the meantime, gone forward.

But the Florida impasse certainly called for reforms. It should not be arguable, in the future, whether a ballot was correctly accosted by the voter. The day of the ambiguous chad should be over. How to do this?

The problem is only technical in nature. Sen. Torricelli of New Jersey has proposed a $100 million dollar program to devise and distribute voting machines to the states whose operation is unambiguous. The argument could be advanced by legislatures opposed to a federalization of voting procedures that to do such a thing is to overstep the authority of the state legislatures.

Question: Would any state, offered a couple of million dollars with which to buy new machines, turn that money down? If so, why? If there is a parochial motive in reserving the power to the individual legislatures, for what purpose is it intended? Since we rule out that partisan advantages are the motives for retaining old and anachronized ballots, what would be the purpose in declining to participate in the loot of new voting machines?