Hello again to you my readers!
I have returned after a short dry spell to readjust myself to my normal posting schedule now that holidays have ended. This week, I address voting in America, and specifically the problems we face when it comes to getting people to vote. Our voting rates hover around 50% at each presidential election, and it is generally less with congressional, state, and local elections. Obviously, this is not a good thing to keep democracy efficient. It is my belief that if a country must have democracy, it must be wholly supported in order to fill the will of its people. The same is true of any form of governance. This week's quote is by Ernesto Guevara, a revolutionary Argentine leader of the past whom I draw inspiration from. Alright, that is all on that.
Moving on, I'd like to start by validating a claim that some Republicans have said President Obama believes. While I don't know if he believes this or not, it is true. We as Americans are lazy. It is a fact. A good lot of us are obese and/or diabetic (http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html), and we make laziness an acceptable societal behavior by making it "funny" on TV all the time. You know what I mean; some character will be lying on the couch, and will try to reach the remote. They end up not getting up because they're too damn lazy. Everyone laughs, etc. In my eyes, it is not funny. The fact that we make this seem to be a normal, tolerable behavior is sickening. What, you can't get up to change the freaking channel once in a while? How lazy are we? This is pathetic, especially for the nation that claims to be the world's lone superpower. How do we plan to defend ourselves if we can't even get off the couch to try? Normally, this would not be a politically important problem. However, we have allowed our laziness to spread into our effectiveness as a nation.
Compared to other effective first world democracies like Italy and Australia our voting rates are not good. Just look here (http://www.idea.int/vt/viewdata.cfm#). You can look up our voting rates, as well as voting rates in all other countries that vote. In presidential elections, we aren't absolutely terrible. We are terrible when it comes to congressional elections. We rarely make it to the halfway margin. Australia rarely falls below the 90% margin. This isn't good. A cornerstone of the democracy Americans praise is voting. In order for our system to work, we all must have input to ensure the full will of the people is heard. However, this is not what is happening. It appears that our voting rates are comparatively low, sometimes only a little and sometimes drastically. This causes wide ramifications for how our government is run for us.
When we vote, we give a mandate to those taking office. This mandate describes that the officials being voted in will do as the people wish, and will serve his/her people as they served him/her into office. It is a good thing most of the time. If enough people vote for a certain candidate that means that s/he has the right to govern and has been chosen by true consensus. But this is the problem we get; not enough people vote. When this happens the candidates receive weak mandates, meaning they didn't receive much of a call to rule. Therefore, their right to do so can easily be called into question. It can also lead to illegal rule, where a candidate is voted in solely because the voter turnout was heavily swayed to one side while the other side was too lazy to get out and vote. While we don't have the problem of fraudulent elections, if voting rates continue dropping we just might. We also don't have a problem with voter fraud inherently, although it could be possible in the future.
Before I keep going, I'd like to address our so-called voter fraud troubles. Some of you may recently have been hearing about voter ID laws passed in many states. Most are nonsensical to some degree. Some have been challenged in court. All because conservatives cry out that we have rampant voter fraud. Really? Voter fraud? You think we are collectively active enough to illegally vote rather than do it legally? What could make anyone think we would do that, lazy as we are? Also, being a citizen who is of voting age should be all that is required to vote. If you are a citizen, you are inherently American, and part of that is voting. Case closed. And when states pass voter ID laws, it is ridiculous. The party that claims to love the constitution is doing what it can to prevent Americans from taking part in our government. They are restricting democracy they claim to hold on to with their dying breaths. This is a serious fault. We cannot expect to believe that we have voter fraud problems; we are not the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and we are not Burma. We are the United States of America. No one is stuffing ballot boxes that easily, trust me.
Anyway, we need to find out why we are so lazy and correct it. I'm sure our collective fatness is probably responsible to some small degree. But it is far more than that, I assure you. It is not normal for a country's people to have more voter turnout for American Idol than the presidential election. I personally believe that we are simply lazy as an inherent trait of Americans. Therefore, I believe we must provide some form of incentive for voting. Perhaps we can go the way of Australia and impose a fine for not voting. They do have some pretty high voter turnout rates, after all. I think this a fair solution to our problems. However, some people would claim this is unconstitutional and that it is in contrast with democracy. Good enough argument, I suppose. If so, another solution is necessary. If anyone here has taken U.S. history in ninth grade, you'll remember the party machines of the early 1900's. These party machines were strongly partisan groups that would provide jobs to people in exchange for votes. While this was a heavy indicator of corrupt democracy, it was efficient at bringing out voters. We need something similar but nonpartisan today. While I don't suggest hiring common folk in exchange for the promise of voting, there must be something that makes us as Americans want to participate in democracy. Maybe it could be a tax incentive, or some form of salary bonus that would come with all the more voting people do. While this problem is hard to tackle with positive incentives, it is possible. And perhaps if this problem is solved, our system will be a better representation of America as a whole.
Well, that is all for this week, and if anyone would like to post comments/questions/criticisms/praise you can do so in the comments section here. My friend Danyal Ahmad is president of the nonprofit corporation which is currently in the process of applying for a 501(c)(3), the Citizen Empowerment Foundation, to ameliorate our problems with voting, so I'm glad some of us are making progress, and if anyone else would like to get in on that then do so. If you would prefer somewhere else, I also have a Facebook and a twitter, along with my email at zerospintop@live.com. This is SuperJew McLovin, signing off.
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