Stay Home

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the fate of the republic does not depend upon every adult voting on November 2. Somehow, our democracy has managed to survive even though only about half of all eligible adults bothered to cast votes in the last few elections.
Just as all politicians are expected to salute God, motherhood and apple pie, candidates dutifully recite the catechism that every American has a duty to vote. In truth, we have too many people voting, and would do better if even more stayed home on election day. Efforts to encourage lazy or reluctant adults to cast ballots actually harms the process by diluting the votes cast by the diligent voters.
What good, I ask you, is an ignorant vote? How is democracy served when a significant percentage of the electorate’s window upon the campaign consists of watching the Daily Show or laughing at a Jay Leno monologue?
In many ways, voter motivation movements, such as “Rock the Vote,” which uses vacuous rock stars to encourage young people to vote, or Votergasm.com, which dangles the promise of sex in front of pimple-faced 18 year olds to get them to the polls, do democracy no favors.
Votergasm encourages girls to give it up for guys who vote. Non-voters are supposed to be given the “I have a headache tonight” treatment.
Vote counters have no way of evaluating how much thought went into any vote they count. Some of us read and deliberate on the issues year around. We know for whom we will cast our votes and why. But our votes count no more than that cast by the barely post pubescent college freshman, who hopes that he might get lucky on election night if he gets that cute chick on the second floor to notice the “I voted” sticker on his shirt.
And by the way ladies, if you see anybody still wearing one of those stickers on November 6, be careful. He’s probably a little frustrated and desperate by then. But, I digress.
It’s no coincidence that Democrats are behind most of these get-out-the-vote efforts. To understand why, look at the results of the next public opinion poll. The results of presidential polls are usually broken down into “registered voters” and “likely voters,” with the latter obviously the more motivated. A consistent result is that the Democratic candidate always does better among all registered voters, while the Republican does best among “likely voters.” Clearly, Democrats have a vested interest in getting the least interested into the polling booth.
When they can be enticed to the polls, the apathetic and the ill-informed are among the most reliable Democratic voters,. They are nearly as reliable as patients in mental institutions, for whom Democratic activists commonly fill out absentee ballots. Democrats have a vested interest in having as many ignorant and unmotivated voters as possible casting ballots.
The underlying message that democracy’s survival demands that every adult vote is just an appeal to the vanity of the unlikely voter. In truth, low voter turnout is not a symptom of a sick democracy. It’s more a manifestation of a largely satisfied populace. What really gets people to the polls is anger. We have low turnouts today because almost everybody who wants a job has one and we have an all-volunteer military to fight our wars.
When I look back through history, some of the sickest democracies on earth had the highest voter turnout. Just a couple of years ago, Saddam Hussein was unanimously elected in an election that boasted 100% voter turnout – a result that CNN reported unflinchingly.
Interestingly, Jimmy Carter leveled less criticism at Iraq’s electoral process than he has at Florida’s.
In the Thirties, German elections saw voter turnouts that were nearly as high as Iraq’s. That was the Germany of Adolf Hitler for you unlikely voters.
I don’t think that either of those nations would be held up as an example of a vibrant democracy.
My advice is that, if you have not actively informed yourself, if you don’t know the difference between the national debt and the deficit, if you don’t know the definition of an “entitlement program,” and how much of the federal budget such programs consume, if you don’t know what a top marginal rate is, do us all a favor and watch Gilligan’s Island reruns on November 2.