It’s election-recount-mania in Detroit nowadays. First, former mayoral candidate Freman Hendrix formally requested a vote recount, followed by almost-elected council candidate Jai-Lee Dearing, and topped entirely by suddenly ousted City Clerk Jackie Currie. Now some school board candidate has joined the fray, soon to be joined in the stampede by everyone who has ever run for student council and feels jilted.

It’s one thing for Hendrix to ask for a recount, although it won’t do much good because the votes of the dead, the mentally incapacitated, and the non-residents will add up in roughly the same fraudulent way as the first time. Same for failed council candidate Jai-Lee Dearing and the others.

But when outgoing City Clerk Jackie Currie joins the request, asking that her own election work be scrutinized, mere sneering sarcasm or indignation cannot rise to the level demanded by her shameless audacity.

A recap of election-related problems on her watch: votes were lost from nine precincts and not found and counted for two days, voting memory packs were taken home by election workers and not returned until the next day, test votes were not cleared from 17 precincts and were added to the actual voting results, and sealed ballot boxes were discovered a week after the election, with uncounted votes.

Then there’s the blatant tampering with absentee ballots before the vote, including pre-filled-out forms sent to voters; the mailing of tens of thousands of absentee ballots against a court order; ballots returned with votes by deceased people; and workers from the city clerk’s office who “assisted” senile people in voting for Currie and Kwame Kilpatrick.

Now she hopes to retain her office on the basis that she ran her office so incompetently that you can’t trust the results of the election she oversaw. Her reasoning boils down to this: Based specifically on being thoroughly incompetent, she should have her old job back.

In just about any other city, the proffering of one’s own idiocy as a specific qualification for office would be laughable and ridiculous. But this is Detroit, and Currie can ask for a recount with a straight face and without embarrassment because she knows her audience well – they’re the same people who took a look at her, dementia and all, and decided to put her in charge of the city’s elections. Several times.

You almost have to root for her.

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From the Freep, an article purporting that Detroit’s mammoth illiteracy rate is “slightly” and “a little bit” better:

“Most of the talk about literacy has to do with school test scores,” said Charles Miller, the study’s author and president of Central Connecticut State University. “That’s just part of the story.” Miller used six criteria: education level of the residents; number of libraries; newspaper readership; number of booksellers; number of publishing journals or periodicals, and, new this year, Internet use in terms of reading newspapers, ordering books and having access.

Just because someone opens a bookstore somewhere doesn’t by osmosis make the surrounding residents any more literate. That’s like saying a neighborhood becomes more muscular because a Powerhouse Gym opened down the street. Nothing suggests the presence of libraries or bookstores compels neighbors to actually go into the library or bookstore and read the books. And rarely is surfing the web considered particularly uplifting.

The article ends with a suggestion for increasing literacy, offering perhaps the silliest thing I’ve ever read:

Finally, Miller suggests people simply turn on the closed-caption option on their televisions.

“They’re going to hear the words at the same time they see them, and without even realizing they’re studying,” Miller said.

This somehow manages to be condescending and coddling at the same time. Besides the fact that closed-captioning is usually replete with misspelled words and nonsense garble, trying to pass off TV watching as “studying” is like referring to lifting a beer can and drinking from it as “lifting weights.”

It amounts to lowering the standards to the level of the stupid, rather than lifting the illiterate to the level of the intelligent. It’s an attempt to Jackie Curriefy the population, to surrender to ignorance, to codify idiocy as the norm. It’s coddling the worst about people rather than demanding the best of them. We’ll never have a World Class City by requiring the least from our residents. Low expectations breed low results. Haven’t we had enough of that here yet?