The Voting Right Act

The history of voting rights in America is a sort of “Cliff Notes” version of our entire social history. Beginning with the white, property owning male only deal and meandering to the current policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t think, don’t even bother”, we have, at the federal and state level, been through an intelligently designed evolution resulting in the broadest and least utilized franchise in the industrial world. Given that the media is unwholesomely absorbed with political banter and everyone is simultaneously obsessed with and disgusted with the government, from Washington, DC to Anywhere USA, it is something of an irony that more people don’t vote, but somewhat less surprising that when they do, they mostly do something fucked up.

John Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence and later President, wrote in 1776 that letting just anybody vote was not a really groovy idea, saying “depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.” We do, after all, hold these truths to be self evident.

Let me state for the record that I have tremendous respect for the men, and it was pretty much men, who founded this nation, but I am able to respect them in the context of their times and not deify them beyond the bounds of logic. Some of our fellow citizens, who somewhat cryptically refer to themselves as “Constitutionalists”, probably agree with President Adams about who ought to be able to vote; on the other hand, I’m not sure how they feel about 18th Century dentistry. The world has changed an awful lot since 1776 (or June of 1788) and Alexander Hamilton and James McHenry would have had to smoke a pound of peyote before signing the Constitution to even have a hint of things to come.

So anyway, everybody bitches and calls each other names, but no more then half of them ever vote, and, as noted, when they do, they keep re-electing the same shit-asses they were all complaining about. Clearly this process is not highly effective and the analogy of Nero getting all Charlie Daniels while Rome flames is pretty apt for what our elected leadership is up to now. If it weren’t for the empirically demonstrated fact that Oligarchies, Plutocracies, Duel Monarchies, Triumvirates, Cults of Personality, Articles of Confederation, Holy Roman Empires, Soviet Unions and Philosopher Kings all ultimately result in the loss of liberty, we would be wise to try something else. Unfortunately, in the humble opinion of this Wormhole Repairman, there ain’t nothing else.

Where that leaves us is with the burden of overcoming human failure, forming a more perfect union and not pissing in the Ferrari’s gas tank anymore. In order to do so, I propose a few changes to the electoral process, proposals which are at least as serious as they are facetious. They are as follows:

1) No party identification of any kind is allowed on the ballot, not even animal avatars.

2) Candidate order on the ballot is determined by the total number of anagrams each candidate can derive from the letters of their entire names.

3) All candidates, for whatever elective office, must provide a 250 word summary of their political views, which is to be attached to the ballot. The summary cannot utilize the suffixes –ive, -ist, or –ism.

4) Voters must check off that they have read the statement of political views of every candidate in the race before casting their ballot. In fact, a brief quiz on the material, requiring a minimum score for the ballot to be counted, is probably in order.

5) Voters cannot vote in any election where they cannot name all of the candidates in each race prior to voting. The names of all the candidates would be posted at the polling place where uneducated voters could brush up. A score of 75 percent might even be acceptable.

6) You must say please and thank you to all the poll workers.

The central problem that America is facing now is that representative democracy is a failure and there is no back-up plan. We are too lazy, too emotional, to ignorant, too apathetic, too frightened, too irresponsible, too inconsistent, too distracted, too easily manipulated, too tired and too busy to fulfill our civic obligation to be informed and dedicated voters. Political parties are a party at our expense, career politicians are inevitably self-serving douche-bags and extremist of every stripe are too full of bile and feces to lead us anywhere except straight down the alley to the whore house. As Ulysses Everett McGill has noted “damn, we’re in a tight spot.”