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I'm not going to tell you "get out there and vote!" There aren't a lot of good choices this year, especially in the Presidential race. I wouldn't blame anyone for sitting this one out, or for not voting in contests where you don't feel you have anyone to vote for. Sure, you can vote against, but that means you're probably still voting for a seriously non-ideal candidate.
If I had a campaign sign in my front yard, it would read, "LOTSA LUCK." We're going to need it.
Bit of history: did you know the U. S. didn't even have secret ballots until the mid-19th Century, and most places hadn't had printed, government-supplied ballots until a few years before that? At one point, legislators were arguing that voting was a public trust and if you let people vote in secret, they'd only vote for their own self-interest instead of considering the needs of the greater community. What actually happened was voter turnout began to decline and has declined steadily ever since. Correlation isn't causation but that one makes me wonder.
My biased school history books rate the US adoption of the "Australian Ballot" as an anti-machine-politics measure -- parties had become too obvious in their buying of votes, so we took away their ability to be sure that the voters stayed-bought.
ReplyDeleteIt is obvious to me that some of those campaigning to allow "ballot selfies" as a free-speech measure do so in a wish to facilitate their current boss-Tweed.
Reading some of the court opinions on the matter, they essentially say "Government hasn't prosecuted anyone lately for this extremely obvious method of facilitating vote-buying that everyone has known about since 7th grade social studies class, so they have failed at demonstrating a compelling interest this aspect of protecting ballot secrecy."
I'm hoping my bank doesn't use the same sort of logic for security of online accounts – "We don't know whether or not anyone has used this published exploit to cause a loss for us, so until it is obvious that there is a problem, we'll not install the patch".
I would suggest that if your vote is yours, you ought to be able to sell it. Otherwise, it was never really yours at all. But I don't think the government is obliged to make it easy for you to prove you kept your side of the transaction. There's a practical side, too -- voting is slow enough without every self-absorbed ijit taking a picture of their special snowflake ballot. Hey, buttercup, there's a lot of other kids waiting and each one of our votes is just one teeny, tiny droplet in the great flood that's not gonna change much, so put your phone away and move on!
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