On Voting

4 November 2008 @ 23:51 | Posted in » New Jersey, Politics

Bull Moose has a post today extolling why not everyone should vote.

Vote or don’t.

I don’t subscribe to the “everyone should vote” school of thought. Every non-felon citizen should be given the opportunity to vote, but you won’t catch me hassling someone to vote when they’ve put less thought into the vote for President of the United States than into their vote for American Idol.

If voting feels like a chore then you probably don’t care enough to have put enough thought into your vote to make it worthwhile to you or your local, state, and federal government. Don’t vote based on political ads and the desire for a free Starbucks coffee.

Don’t worry that you feel like you are wasting your rights. The right to vote will be there if you grow up enough to put some thought into your vote. It’s an important right, but so is the right to a jury trial in a criminal case, and you wouldn’t go out of your way to use that just to say you did.

If you think you have a good reason to vote for McCain or Obama, Rossi or Gregoire, or your county commissioner, and are proud to go wait in line to vote, go do it. If you are a little fuzzy on your reasons and want to vote because you want the “I voted” sticker to impress Doris from accounting, don’t waste your time or ours.

I concur.

I read the New Jersey ballot questions to my students today. The wording is baffling.

Do you approve the proposed amendment to the State Constitution which provides that, after this amendment becomes part of the Constitution, a law enacted thereafter that authorizes State debt created through the sale of bonds by any autonomous public corporate entity, established either as an instrumentality of the State or otherwise exercising public and essential governmental functions, such as an independent State authority, which debt or liability has a pledge of an annual appropriation as the ways and means to pay the interest of such debt or liability as it falls due and pay and discharge the principal of such debt, will be subject to voter approval, unless the payment of the debt is made subject to appropriations of an independent non-State source of revenue paid by third persons for the use of the object or work bonded for, or are from a source of State revenue otherwise required to be appropriated pursuant to another provision of the Constitution?

and

Shall the amendment to Article VI, Section VI, paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, agreed to by the Legislature, providing that judges of inferior courts with jurisdiction extending to more than one municipality be appointed as provided in law rather than as provided in the Constitution which requires nomination by the Governor and appointment with the advice and consent of the Senate, be approved?

My students’ eyes rolled. I explained that many folks who would answer those today would equally be baffled.

Tonight I wrote in Newt Gingrich for president. It is the first time I ever wrote in a vote. Of course, write-in is not the proper term. I typed it in as we have electronic voting here.

I held Fritz in my arms as I did this. I noticed that as I completed the ballot that there was something written on the screen. Someone before me had written in a candidate for a local election . . . in pen . . . on the machine . . . in the blank where one would have typed in the answer.

Yes, there are some folks who should not vote.