Absentee Voters

November 7, 2017

Greetings from the poles,

Tomorrow will mark an important milestone in our country: we will stop complaining about the election and start complaining about whoever is president.  It’s kind of a tradition.

But, sadly, some citizens will not be able to take part in this tradition. 

There have been a great many polls asking why people skip going to the polls.  The result is almost always the same:  I don’t like the candidates.  I am too busy.  My vote doesn’t matter because of the electoral college/my wife votes for the other candidate/illegal aliens/the Republicans or the Democrats will shred it/I’m disenfranchised.  I don’t want to show my ID because then the Government will find me. I’ll be out of town (but don’t tell the Government or they will find me).

There are a variety of rules that allow people to go to the polls without actually going to them.

And yet people do not go in staggering numbers. 

For purposes of argument, which this will undoubtedly provoke, let’s say there are 220 million citizens of legal voting age in our country.  If we follow the example of the last presidential election, then approximately 43% of voters will stay home. 

So that means that approximately 9.3 million people will not vote.  Or to put it another way, that is like everyone in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Vermont, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Delaware, Montana,  and the city of Scottsdale Arizona, all skip voting.

According to some recent studies, less than 50% of voters could identify these states on a map, and except for its residents no one knows where Scottsdale is.  So in more approachable terms, if you combined all of the people who didn’t vote, they would occupy approximately 23,000,000 cubic feet. Can you picture that?

How about this: If you laid all the non-voters end to end they would reach from the North Pole the South Pole, but they would have to stretch their hands over their heads.  In other words if they don’t make some effort then they would not reach the poles.  (See what I did there?)

This is a convoluted way of bringing the issue to your attention, with the hopes we might be able to do something about it.  Our fellow Americans are being deprived of their constitutional right to gripe about the how the county is run.  The only way we can change this is to give them a reason to vote, so they can grumble about it for the next four years.

In some countries it is mandatory to vote, which is one way to get people to do things.   I know, I know, you can’t tell Americans what to do.  There would be a rebellion, an uprising, people would turn out in the tens of millions to protest.  There would be riots, insurrection, wholesale routing of the entire elected body.  See how that could work?  So, one way to get people to vote would be to tell them if they don’t vote then they will HAVE to vote in order to not vote in the future. 

The other possibility is to pass the Use It or Lose It amendment.  If you fail to vote then you are not allowed to vote.  That would get some attention.  Imagine if we told everyone in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Vermont, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Delaware, Montana, and the city of Scottsdale Arizona that they were not allowed to vote; there would be such a hue and cry you could hear it at the North Pole.

The answer is not more civics classes in junior high, or creating even more nonprofit organizations with arcane acronyms to educate the non-voting populace.  (Dave Berry would say that ‘Arcane Acronyms’ would be a great name for a rock band.)  There is already a proven way to get people out in long lines when they should be at work.

Powerball.  Earlier this year this super lottery sold 635 million tickets for a $1.5 billion dollar prize.  That’s like 3 tickets per eligible voter.  Imagine if the government promised a Powerball ticket for every person that voted.  People would be lined up for miles to cast their ballot.   Naturally the government would take back half of the prize money in taxes, and the rest of the cost could be charged against social security or hidden in the military budget. 

And the winner could move to a different country if they didn’t like how things were going. 

I’m just full of good ideas.  Maybe I should run for office.  I’ll bet that would get people out to vote in a hurry.

Hope this finds you making your mark,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith