It’s Election Day, So Now for the Stories on the Herculean Burdens of Voting
[guest post by JVW]
Happy Election Day, my fellow deluded sheep.
It’s a tradition on the left every election day to lament the seemingly insurmountable hardships that are placed before the voter who is simply trying to accomplish the task of exercising his or her Constitutional right to participate in our democratic republic. Four years ago, for example, I relayed the MSNBC guest who tried to insist that college kids in Gainesville, Florida were being disenfranchised because there were only about about nine polling locations within walking distance of the University of Florida. Today we’re treated to the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, Jonathan Tepperman, picking up the theme on the utter impossibility of voting:
Why does the United States have among the lowest voter turnout rates in the developed world? There's no mystery: it's because we make it so hard to vote. @columlynch https://t.co/J6bkOdsThe
— Jonathan Tepperman (@j_tepperman) November 6, 2018
Fortunately, most of Twitter isn’t having it:
At age 18, I went to the Board of Elections & registered to vote, without any assistance from parents or friends. Then when I went out of state to college, I voted absentee for four years. I did this in my late teens & early 20s. It wasn't difficult & still isn't rocket science.
— Luke Ramone (@lukeramone) November 6, 2018
And a couple of other responses:
I can imagine what Jonathan Tepperman would think of my first voting experience in the Presidential election of 1988. I was in school in Massachusetts at the time, but I wanted to vote in my native Colorado, so I had to write the Colorado Secretary of State requesting an absentee ballot, then when it was mailed to me I actually had to take it in and have it notarized before I could return it. And what with deadlines and the U.S. Postal Service and all of that, I had to make sure I mailed it in at least a week before Election Day. Since then of course, we have had rounds of “voting reforms” which include the motor-voter law which allowed people to register when they renewed drivers licenses, permanent absentee ballots which allow people like me to get the ballot in advance and dispense with it at our leisure, polling stations that open a week before the election so you can vote when the mood strikes you, same day registration for those who are so lazy that they can’t rouse themselves to register until the day of the election, provisional voting so that even if you probably aren’t eligible to vote you get to cast a ballot that Democrats can then insist gets counted later, and now even automatic voter registration that adds you to the polls on your eighteenth birthday without you having to do a damn thing. Next comes a bad idea imported in from overseas: mandatory voting, a favorite of academic leftists who are adverse to personal freedom.
There may come a day when the advocates of loose and easy voting win, and exercising your sacred right to the ballot becomes as easy and, in fact, pretty much the same thing as clicking a “Like” button on your smartphone from the safety and comfort of your couch. I hope not to be around should that day come, but I can be reasonably sure it won’t be some glorious day in the annals of democracy, it will instead be yet another step on the long and, I regret to say, seemingly inexorable slide into national mediocrity.
– JVW
