The Meat of the Matter

A Conspiracy of Dunces

I will start this blog with a confession: I didn't vote in the 2000 election. I wanted to. I tried. I had recently moved, and needed to re-register. I did so by going to onlinedemocracy.com. At the time, it was quite a new service and did NOT include "Libertarian" as a party of choice. I wrote that affiliation in, and assumed I was registered. I did not receive any confirmation, and it wasn't until October that I realized that nothing had come in my mail. I never figured out what happened. It was too late to register again. I was not able to vote for Al Gore. It was the first election when I was old enough to vote that I did not participate in and I was left feeling quite bad. The turnout of the election did not help. I was left feeling like it was my fault, and that I was an idiot. But was I? This year, I have moved again. I have registered twice and have not recieved any confirmation that I am registered. I am now going to try a third time by going here. I may try both the online version AND the mail-in version. What a pain in the ass! How about this: I will vote for whoever will let me! Hello? Shouldn't voter registration be easy? Why isn't it? I do know this: politicians are afraid to change the mechanics of the voting process because it will nullify most of their past marketing intelligence. A political race is a game of inches, and it's no wonder since most elections are Mr. Pablum versus Mr. Vapid. But if you change the sample (which is what a change in voter registration would do), you can radically change the number of inches Mr. Pablum might or might not move. So they don't want to change it. So I will register to vote for the third and fourth time today. Maybe one will hit. After all, you can't win if you don't play, right?