Posted by
Nerdus Maximus on Saturday, August 12, 2006 4:37:44 PM
It wouldn’t really be very hard to figure out which prize
you wanted to claim, would it? Quantity
isn’t always a good thing. In fact,
more of a bad thing is undesirable.
This can lead to some uncomfortable places when applied to voter
turnout.
Over the history of democracy there has been a tendency to
increase the percentage of the population that is eligible to vote and a
corresponding tendency to think of more people voting as an unmitigated
positive. There have undoubtedly been
vote restricting laws that were intended to harm or disenfranchise groups of
people, and that was wrong. But what if
some of the rules that limited who could vote the early years of democracy had
a point? I suspect this may have been
the case.
A vote is a serious thing and not everyone is capable of
being serious. We recognize this by not
allowing people to vote until they are eighteen years old. If you have any doubts about the wisdom of
not letting 16 year olds vote, let me introduce you to my son. He is very intelligent and articulate (we
have test results to prove it) and well informed (my opinion) for a 16 year
old, but a 5 minute conversation is all it would take for you to be glad he
can’t vote. Unfortunately, I find he is
much more capable of holding a considered opinion than most 18 year olds I’ve
met, and the law allows them to vote.
This is the point at which I begin to wonder if “get out
the vote” efforts are a good thing. Do
the votes of people who have made no attempt to become informed about the
issues and knowledgeable of the candidates “stands” improve the quality of an
election? The key to victory in
elections today is how good your strategists are at raising money and using it
to get people to vote for you with as little information as possible. Don’t think, just vote for me.
What can be done about it? My first quite impractical thought was a voter qualification test. Correctly answer 20 of 25 questions randomly
pulled from a pool of 500 questions on current events, American History and basic
civics and you get to vote. Don’t know
that there are 100 U.S. Senators? Sorry, but can’t vote for one.
Nerdus
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