alm Beach County's butterfly ballot is confusing to voters, claims a new study in the scientific journal Nature — but all it really proves is that American fourth-graders can outwit Canadian shoppers.

A team led by Robert Sinclair of the University of Alberta gave 53 Canadian shoppers a double-column butterfly ballot like the one used in Palm Beach County, but with the candidate names changed to reflect the contest for Canadian prime minister. Of these 53 shoppers, four made mistakes, including three who voted for a candidate in the wrong column — the same sort of blunder Democratic partisans say Al Gore supporters made by voting accidentally for Pat Buchanan. But before you conclude that these shoppers are just putting the "duh" back in Canada, consider this: A similar number of shoppers were given a single-column ballot, and none of them committed an error.

In a press release, Nature concludes: "Although the sample size of the shopper study was small (116 shoppers in total), the results are statistically significant, and support the conclusion (already drawn from the unexpectedly large number of Buchanan votes in Palm Beach County) that the butterfly ballot can cause systematic voting errors."

Not so fast. The sample size wasn't just "small," it was incredibly small. The results may have been "statistically significant," but they would have been much more authoritative if the study had drawn from 500 or 1,000 subjects, rather than a bit more than four dozen. And "Canadian shoppers" are hardly representative of the U.S. voting population, let alone the elderly one in Palm Beach County — which employed a double-column butterfly ballot so it could print the names of candidates in large type. (A single-column format would have introduced its own kind of problems for voters who have trouble reading tiny print.) Finally, the assumption that Buchanan's Palm Beach vote total was "unexpectedly large" is dubious: Buchanan attracted an unimpressive eight-tenths of one percent of the overall vote, he received a higher rate of support in several other Florida counties, and he actually won a greater number of Palm Beach votes in the 1996 GOP presidential primary.

But let's set all that aside and turn our attention to Stockwell Elementary School in Bossier City, La. Right after the presidential election, fourth-grade teacher Lisa Burns gave her class of 8- and 9-year olds a copy of Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot and asked them to cast a vote for Gore, just to see if they could manage it. The result? All 22 of them chose correctly.

"We discussed the controversy," explained Burns. "Some students said they could see how it could be difficult, but the majority of them said it wasn't difficult, and that grown-ups can ask questions if they don't understand."

The only mistake Burns herself made was in not writing up her experiment. She could have had an article in a prestigious scientific journal — a surefire boon in the publish-or-perish world of Louisiana elementary schools. Maybe she should submit it now with this conclusion attached: American fourth-graders are smarter than Canadian shoppers.