George Will thinks you're a lazy bastard
Oct. 2nd, 2008 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenEven if you don't exist as a brain attached to a junk-food distended stomach: if your vote isn't of a certain 'quality,' he thinks it shouldn't count.
So, all you people who are invalids, out of the country, or working three jobs just to be able to afford to eat ramen and wish to exercise your Constitutional right to vote and would like your ballot tabulated before the new President is sworn in? You're lazy fuckers who aren't educated enough for George Will to deem your vote worthy. You're probably voting for that uppity guy, too.
No, seriously, this is a problem. I hate that stupid redneck shit-faces go and vote for the candidate that doesn't intimidate their limited intelligences, too, but you don't see me excoriating the worth of their vote. Shit, if those honky good-ol' boys hadn't been able to vote, we'd have had a very different last eight years. I still don't think we need to start re-instating poll taxes and shit to prove the people voting have a goddamned clue about what they're doing. Voter turnout is already about as piss-poor as you could get.
You know what we should do, Mr. Will? Give the vote back to the rich white guys with property only. They've never steered us wrong.
There's also his obsession with that old conservative bugaboo about voter fraud, which is entirely bullshit. There are a lot of problems with elections, but people writing in other people's votes on the voters' side of things is but the tiniest fraction of it. More, vote tampering results from shit like voter intimidation, such as tellling college students they can't vote if their parents claimed them as dependents on their taxes or that anyone with outstanding traffic violations will be immediately arrested if they even show up. Then there's the stuff you don't even have to implicate yourself in doing if you want to fuck with votes: put all of two machines in a district with one or two old ladies left to monitor it who aren't trained and watch the lines peel away after spending hours trying to vote when both break.
If you want to screw with votes, you don't have to do anything illegal. All you have to do is throw your hands up when machines malfunction, say "Well, what can we do? Those are the only votes we have, so we're going to go with it even though the machine recorded more votes than people who showed up today." People stealing their neighbors ballots is so much work. Plus, thanks to the old corrupt Chicago system, we've kinda gotten wise to the dead and pet voting blocks.
It's a shame Will has to be a totally elitist fuckhole, who, as a journalist, consultant, speaker, whatever, can take as much time off as he needs on Election Day to vote, and can probably do so in some rich white guy district where no filthy brown people will make him wait on to cast his informed vote while they vote for the guy who'll give them more watermelon and chicken wings. Because he did have one--ONE--cogent point, and that's that early voters truncate the learning process about candidates, and that's a shame. Given how the Palin thing is falling out, there are people who, if they'd cast ballots after the convention in favor of McCain because of her who would be now (one would hope) bashing their heads against walls.
However, since he then points out that early voters also are more likely to inform themselves more thoroughly on policies of candidates than the electorate who vote in November, and are, therefore, unlikely to have changed their vote, this point isn't really relevant. I said it was cogent point only because in an election season that wasn't quite as long, we might not have been inundated with info on the candidates. We have, so fuck off, George Will.
Also, explain to me how these voters are lazy, worthless shits unworthy of getting a voice if this is true:
Furthermore, those unusually partisan and informed people who take advantage of early voting options are not typically the poor or people who, absent those options, would be nonvoters.
Meaning they would have voted at the local place anyway. Are their votes still worthless? You know George Will thinks they are.
The second problem with early voting is that one of its supposed benefits is actually a subtraction from civic health. The benefit is that it makes voting easier—indeed, essentially effortless. But surely the quality of the electoral turnout declines when the quantity is increased by "convenience voting."
Yeah! Because if more people have a say by voting, they're bound not to be rich white blowhards--law of averages! That means they won't vote for the rich white blowhards I like! WAAAAH
Shorter Trinity: ROT IN HELL, GEORGE WILL.
So, all you people who are invalids, out of the country, or working three jobs just to be able to afford to eat ramen and wish to exercise your Constitutional right to vote and would like your ballot tabulated before the new President is sworn in? You're lazy fuckers who aren't educated enough for George Will to deem your vote worthy. You're probably voting for that uppity guy, too.
No, seriously, this is a problem. I hate that stupid redneck shit-faces go and vote for the candidate that doesn't intimidate their limited intelligences, too, but you don't see me excoriating the worth of their vote. Shit, if those honky good-ol' boys hadn't been able to vote, we'd have had a very different last eight years. I still don't think we need to start re-instating poll taxes and shit to prove the people voting have a goddamned clue about what they're doing. Voter turnout is already about as piss-poor as you could get.
You know what we should do, Mr. Will? Give the vote back to the rich white guys with property only. They've never steered us wrong.
There's also his obsession with that old conservative bugaboo about voter fraud, which is entirely bullshit. There are a lot of problems with elections, but people writing in other people's votes on the voters' side of things is but the tiniest fraction of it. More, vote tampering results from shit like voter intimidation, such as tellling college students they can't vote if their parents claimed them as dependents on their taxes or that anyone with outstanding traffic violations will be immediately arrested if they even show up. Then there's the stuff you don't even have to implicate yourself in doing if you want to fuck with votes: put all of two machines in a district with one or two old ladies left to monitor it who aren't trained and watch the lines peel away after spending hours trying to vote when both break.
If you want to screw with votes, you don't have to do anything illegal. All you have to do is throw your hands up when machines malfunction, say "Well, what can we do? Those are the only votes we have, so we're going to go with it even though the machine recorded more votes than people who showed up today." People stealing their neighbors ballots is so much work. Plus, thanks to the old corrupt Chicago system, we've kinda gotten wise to the dead and pet voting blocks.
It's a shame Will has to be a totally elitist fuckhole, who, as a journalist, consultant, speaker, whatever, can take as much time off as he needs on Election Day to vote, and can probably do so in some rich white guy district where no filthy brown people will make him wait on to cast his informed vote while they vote for the guy who'll give them more watermelon and chicken wings. Because he did have one--ONE--cogent point, and that's that early voters truncate the learning process about candidates, and that's a shame. Given how the Palin thing is falling out, there are people who, if they'd cast ballots after the convention in favor of McCain because of her who would be now (one would hope) bashing their heads against walls.
However, since he then points out that early voters also are more likely to inform themselves more thoroughly on policies of candidates than the electorate who vote in November, and are, therefore, unlikely to have changed their vote, this point isn't really relevant. I said it was cogent point only because in an election season that wasn't quite as long, we might not have been inundated with info on the candidates. We have, so fuck off, George Will.
Also, explain to me how these voters are lazy, worthless shits unworthy of getting a voice if this is true:
Furthermore, those unusually partisan and informed people who take advantage of early voting options are not typically the poor or people who, absent those options, would be nonvoters.
Meaning they would have voted at the local place anyway. Are their votes still worthless? You know George Will thinks they are.
The second problem with early voting is that one of its supposed benefits is actually a subtraction from civic health. The benefit is that it makes voting easier—indeed, essentially effortless. But surely the quality of the electoral turnout declines when the quantity is increased by "convenience voting."
Yeah! Because if more people have a say by voting, they're bound not to be rich white blowhards--law of averages! That means they won't vote for the rich white blowhards I like! WAAAAH
Shorter Trinity: ROT IN HELL, GEORGE WILL.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 03:02 am (UTC)And the Bush v Gore decision relied on their not being an individual right to vote for the president.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 02:00 pm (UTC)I was mostly pointing out the ideal, at the very least, that a vote is a vote is a vote, and that James P. Elliott III's vote for right-wing-conservative matters as much as Joe Smith's vote for left-wing-liberal... WITHOUT getting into the electoral college and how population centers skew the "worth" of a vote.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 03:48 am (UTC)