QUOTATION: People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote - a very different thing. - Walter H. Judd
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2004-10-15 - 5:44 p.m. Too Many Obstacles to VotingA friend just sent me this URL ofthe new electronic Florida ballot.
Just yesterday I received an e-mail from a blogger friend, who had said in his journal that the debates were for him academic because he didn't vote. I immediately wrote and asked him if it was because he wasn't a citizen...or why? He wrote back:"I won't vote (in any election, down through Municipal) until the Electoral College system is abolished. If I vote for Candidate A, but Candidate B wins my state and gets ALL THE ELECTORAL VOTES, then my voice (however small) hasn't been heard. That's not Democracy to me, and I refuse to be party to it." I have for several years been writing to my Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and Mike Thompson. Their response to me time after time has been some argument that it would not be fair to the states with low population; that the candidates would never visit them, but would spend all of their time where they were apt to get the most votes. [Of course, we in California have not only had candidates visit us this year, but political ads have not even been placed in some areas of the state.] I feel just as Tom does about electoral college, except I will never give up my voice, weak as it sometimes feels - especially so when the Supreme Court effectively appointed the President by not allowing the vote count to continue in the last election. Until this year, I had not realized there was no constitutional reason for it. Individual states can vote to use popular vote. I am very fearful we are going to get into the same situation as in 2000 on November 2nd if the vote is as close as it was last time.
This op-ed piece by Sheila Suess Kennedy portends
It's a nice sentiment, but have you ever wondered how things would change if we really believed that everyone should vote? We would start by reforming our process so that everyone's vote counted, beginning with our "winner-take-all" Electoral College system. There are pros and cons to the Electoral College itself. But there really is no reasonable argument for keeping the system used by most states, which awards all of that state's electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. In Indiana, even in the unlikely event that John Kerry were to get 49.9 percent of our popular vote, every one of Indiana's electoral votes would still be cast for George W. Bush. That's a powerful message to Kerry voters in Indiana -- or Bush voters in California -- and the message is: Stay home. There is no constitutional reason to use a winner-take-all system; Nebraska and Maine allocate their votes, and Colorado is in the process of deciding whether to do likewise. The decision is left up to each state. Failing to count losers' votes while you are telling everyone how important voting is sends a decidedly mixed message. Then there's gerrymandering. With today's computers, it's an art form. Both parties draw boundaries that cram the other party's voters into the fewest possible districts, while awarding themselves "safe" ones. As a result, we have fewer and fewer real contests -- and most of those we do have are in the primary. Talk about disincentives for voter participation. "Come out and vote for the candidate who is for all intents and purposes unopposed!" lacks something as a slogan. It's another mixed message. We did get rid of the poll tax, the mechanism that in the bad old days kept "undesirables" from voting. Or did we? A recent report by the NAACP has numerous examples of our more sophisticated, modern versions. There are "ballot security" teams that only "secure" minority neighborhoods. There are tactics like those employed two years ago in Baltimore, where leaflets informed people that they couldn't vote if they had overdue rent or unpaid parking tickets. In Louisiana, fliers in minority neighborhoods assured people that they had three extra days to vote if they couldn't get to the polls on Election Day. In South Dakota, poll workers turned away American Indian voters who lacked photo identification. In Texas, a district attorney who knew better told college students they could not register to vote from their college addresses. This year, the Florida secretary of state has decided that new voter registrations that don't have a citizenship box checked are invalid -- even though the form elsewhere requires the registrant to swear that he or she is a citizen. For a time, Ohio rejected registrations that didn't come in on 80-pound paper. But everyone should register and vote. Can we spell "mixed message?" [Kennedy is associate professor of law and public policy at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Indianapolis.]
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