ABSTRACT
Heralded as the ultimate in permitting the full and mighty voice of the people to overwhelm the whispered conspiracies of the party bosses, legislature after legislature has voted to extend democracy’s public address system with various voting arrangements. The danger of democracy is that democracy’s voice, at least in the presidential search, has been channeled and structured, distorted by artificial time schedules, and limited by rules that pretend to extend democracy. Democracy’s voice, as it were, is amplified through a false or flawed system. Kay Lawson has raised another interesting doubt about the true voice of democracy. The sound technicians can boost the actual voice of a speaker, they can step the system up to clarify and extend the voice impulses. Public address systems, invented and gradually improved, spread the voice of the candidates, and telecommunication soon extended the voice and ultimately the view, finally in living color, to all the precincts.
