Don't vote!

I’ve voted. I don’t know if it will be counted, I just overnighted it from New Zealand, and if you’ve ever overnighted something from New Zealand, you know there is no such thing, there is five daying it, but not overnighting it. Since it is the 28th in the U.S. (29th here, thank you international date line) it is possible my vote may count. It did cost me NZ $25 to vote this year, and this brings me to my point. I was very serious about voting. Serious enough that I spent NZ$25 to vote, and I’m not entirely sure my vote will even arrive in time to count.

Every year, there is a “get out the vote” campaign encouraging people to vote. This is a terrible idea. Why should we ever have to encourage people to vote? Who are these people who we are encouraging to vote? If they really cared, and really payed attention to the issues, wouldn’t they already be voting? Maybe even be willing to pay NZ$25 to vote? I’d have payed NZ$50 if that was what they were charging, and some guy in the States is voting for free who really isn’t that sure what he is voting for? I bet he wouldn’t be voting if he had to pay NZ$3 to vote.

Which gets me to the heart of my rant. Shouldn’t we be encouraging informed people to vote? No, wait, there is no need since they already will. So, perhaps what should be done is it should be made more difficult to vote. We can hardly charge people to vote, I do think that is a terrible idea (almost as bad as encouraging people to vote). Nor should there be a standard, it didn’t work out all that well when white land owning males were the only people allowed to vote. Education level is really no standard either… The willingness to put up with four years of higher education might be grounds for eliminating people from voting.

But some things should be put in place to make sure people who are voting are serious about it. Perhaps doing away with mail in ballots and have all voting booths on the 13th floor of a building with out an elevator. That’d scare away the faint of heart… What about people bound to wheel chairs? We could have a ramp as well (insensitive, me? Voting is serious!).

Maybe we could have some sort of test, nothing to rigorous, something like P.J. O’Rourke’s idea to require people to hop on one foot and spell ‘rhinoceros’. It would add an intelligence aspect to the test, and I’m not crazy about that, so perhaps we’ll put in a caveat that they don’t need to spell it correctly, they just have to make the attempt (I did just have to use spell check to make sure I’d spelled it correctly). Again, people would have to really want to vote to go through the humiliation.

While these ideas are tongue in cheek, I am serious about uninformed people not voting. If you don’t read the newspaper, maybe you shouldn’t vote. If you can’t name at least three of the members of the presidents cabinet, maybe you shouldn’t vote. If you don’t know who is in charge of the Senate, maybe you shouldn’t vote. If you only care about a single issue… Please don’t vote. I’d prefer our nation not be subject to a candidate you voted for because they agree with your views on abortion, an issue that isn’t likely to change any time soon at the federal level.

Voting is a right, and I respect that, but it is also a responsibility. If a blizzard on November 2nd would be enough to keep you home, maybe you should just stay home, you probably aren’t informed enough to have the countries direction at the tip of your fingers.