Vote Smart

My wife and I dropped our ballots in the mailbox yesterday. Our county here in Washington only does mail in voting. I'll say that it is nice to be able to sit down with the ballot and take the time to read the details of the propositions and candidate positions and history. But I'd still prefer a traditional polling place.

First, and very subjective in nature, I find something very satisfying in going out and casting my vote at a polling place. Signing in on the voting registry, filling out the ballot, and dropping it in the box feels substantial. Filling out a form at home, licking an envelope and dropping it in the mailbox, all done with mindfulness that there is a hard deadline for it to be in the mail by feels more like paying a bill than fulfilling a civic duty.

There's the reduction in opportunity for voting fraud as well in that you have to actually show up and sign in. Sure makes dead people voting less likely.

But I also think that there is a "filtering" effect that happens because of opportunity cost. With voter turnout at 64% in 2004, there is certainly a portion of the remaining 36% who just didn't feel that it was worth it and I am willing to wager that with that apathy comes ignorance. They don't really know positions. They don't know records. They don't know what they are voting on other than the 3-8 sentence summary that they gloss over.

Frankly, I am happy when those people don't vote regardless of which way they would have leaned. I wouldn't ever deny anyone their right to vote, but I am sure glad when people who are too apathetic to study out the issues and make an informed decision are also too apathetic to vote. Sending out ballots in the mail negates this and lowers the opportunity cost to those voters in casting their ballot. They get bored with the sitcom they are watching or hear one inflammatory (and almost certainly half-true) statement on some political commercial and impulse vote.

The other side of this is when people of equal ignorance on political, financial, and other pressing issues get swept up in emotion and lose the apathy around activism and voting. Such as this woman, Peggy Joseph.


Disclaimer: this is about her, the voter, not the candidate! I am doing my best to keep politics itself out of this blog. It wouldn't matter if she was at a McCain rally, a Bob Barr rally, or a Cynthia McKinney rally, I'd still use this video as an example.

Ms. Joseph seems to actually believe that if Senator Obama is elected, that she will no longer have to pay her mortgage or pay for the gas in her car. Not only that, she seems to have some real emotions wrapped up in this.

I wonder if our Founding Fathers might have been out of touch with "the people" when they signed the Declaration of Independence and then later when many of them also set up our Federal government. After all, these were people resolved in their cause, committing treason against England, and risking death in participating in setting up a new government. They were passionate about being involved in government, in keeping it in check, and ensuring that the best people were elected and that they were elected based on realistic political promises and outcomes. Did they truly realize how ignorant or apathetic the general populace was? Or if that didn't exist at that point, then how ignorant, apathetic, uninformed, and misinformed the general public would become? Do you think they ever envisioned a Peggy Joseph?

Of course they did, because they set up the Electoral College system. Unfortunately, 48 of the states have set up a winner take all setup so that the winner of the popular vote takes all the electoral votes. Kind of negates the wisdom of an Electoral College in filtering for an ignorant or misinformed general population, doesn't it?

The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 did away with the testing that was in place that discriminated based on race or color. And that is a great thing. No person should be discriminated against and denied their right to vote based on race, color, religion, sex, etc.

But people who are utterly misinformed and ignorant to the reality of what Senator Obama or any political candidate would actually be able to do for her shake the sprouting libertarian in me and leave a tiny piece of me wondering if a very basic political knowledge evaluation and delusional thought screening prior to stepping into the election booth wouldn't be a bad idea.

Truthfully, I'd never actually vote for such a measure to be put in place, because I wouldn't trust that the line in the sand could be drawn well enough and without some bias and/or discrimination built into it. But I'm left wondering how the course of history and politics would/could change if the ignorant and apathetic vote was minimized or eliminated.