People are mobilized, and my guess is that it's because of this failed administration and the horrific thought of another four years of Bush's lunacy.
But I also agree strongly with Cycloptichorn. An informed public eager to vote will learn more about the issues, more about politics (and the myriad drawbacks) and perhaps rely less on propagandist media.
in canada we receive a voter registration card about a month before any election. anyone not receiving a card can apply at a local registration office. mail ballots can also be used. finally, one can still register on the day of election by presenting proper isentification and making a declaration. there is very little excuse for not going to the polls in canda - but still the voter participation is on the low side and falling(canadians are difficult to get excited about an election - unless they are quebecers; they have more spunk). hbg
Sounds like a voter's dream in Canada. I wish it were easier for us south of the border to be able to exercise that style of freedom.
But then (according to the neocons here), Iraq attacked us, and now all bets are off.
Bush had to attack Iraq to save the American People from terrorism/terrorists.
It was his duty. It was hard work to commit our military to war.
I preferred Clinton's Big Mac attacks.
I know of two friends who have been candid enough to admit to abstaining altogether in the past two elections.
Both are intending to vote for Kerry. One of them commented that the President receives a generous pension and he senses that Bush may be more than happy to take the pension and let the Middle East be Kerry's problem.
His sense of it is that Bush still has to go through the motions. He's among the anybody but Bush faction. My other friend is a woman who served for three years in Korea achieving the rank of Specialist First Class who sees Iraq as what she calls a meat grinder. She's glad she served when she did.
My observation in the US is that one has every opportunity to be written out unless one stays on top of it. You do indeed have to register if you move, and that gets some people. And there will always be an underclass of people who don't vote because they are so alienated that they don't see the point.
On the last page someone objected to the notion that the more who exercise their right to vote the better. Yes, we know that honor dies where interest lies (according to Kwai Chang Caine) and it's true.
I think the ancient Greeks had the right idea, especially because they were a society of warlike men. They spawned both Lysistrata and the Amazons - but the thing that made them outstanding was the fact that they polled themselves before laying their lives on the line taking on various outsiders whom they thought of as Barbarians.
My understanding according to linguists is that a barbarian is someone who doesn't speak your language. I don't think the concept of the Barbarian has changed much. But our tendency to try to shake people out of the process is arguably a form of de-volution when you realize how a soldier in Iraq does not share the same freedoms that we have at home. The most notable is not being polled as would have been the case with the Greeks whether you're speaking of Agamemnon or Alexander the great.
The latter is a good example of what happens when the popular adventure finally bogs down. The result is Greek Masonry in the Kingdom of Ashoka in India and in the mountains of Afghanistan all the way into modern Iran.
Anthropologists say that war leads to assimilation. I think I'll have a hummus pita and a cup of café Arabica with some pistachio nuts.
And I vote. (Already registered myself).
The Poll Tax, Updated
Published: October 7, 2004
When members of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino group, were registering voters recently on a Miami Beach sidewalk outside a building where new citizens were being sworn in, the Homeland Security Department ordered them to stop. The department gave all kinds of suspect reasons, which a federal court has since rejected, but it looked a lot as if someone at Homeland Security just didn't want thousands of new Latino voters on the Florida rolls.
The suppression of minority votes is alive and well in 2004, driven by the sharp partisan divide across the nation. Because many minority groups vote heavily Democratic, some Republicans view keeping them from registering and voting as a tactic for victory - one that has a long history in American politics. It is rarely talked about publicly, but John Pappageorge, a Republican state legislator from Michigan, recently broke the taboo. He was quoted in The Detroit Free Press as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle." Detroit's population is more than 80 percent black.
A recent report by the N.A.A.C.P. and People for the American Way includes page after page of examples of how this shabby business works. On Election Day, "ballot security" teams head for minority neighborhoods. They demand that voters produce identification when it is not required, take photographs of voters and single out immigrant voters for special scare tactics.
Two years ago in the governor's race in Maryland, leaflets appeared in Baltimore saying that before voters showed up at the polls, they had to pay off all parking tickets and overdue rent. The same year in Louisiana, fliers were distributed in African-American areas to tell voters, falsely, that if they did not want to vote on Election Day, they could still vote three days later.
What is particularly discouraging this year is the degree to which government officials have been involved in such efforts. In South Dakota's hard-fought statewide Congressional race, poll workers turned away Native American voters who could not provide photo identification, which many of them do not have, even though the law clearly says identification is not required. In one heavily Native American county, the top elections official, who is white, wrote out instructions saying no one could vote without photo identification. In Texas, a white district attorney threatened to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M, a large, predominantly African-American campus, if they registered to vote from the school, even though they are entitled to by law.
And in Florida, the secretary of state, Glenda Hood, had a list prepared to purge felons from the voter rolls; the list had many errors and would have turned away an untold number of qualified black voters. She abandoned the list only when news organizations sued to make it public, then pointed out its many inaccuracies.
In addition to these blatant forms of vote suppression, elections officials have been adopting policies that appear neutral on their face but often have the effect, and perhaps the intent, of disproportionately disenfranchising minorities. With huge registration drives under way among minorities in swing states, some secretaries of state have adopted bizarrely rigid rules for new registrations.
In Florida, Ms. Hood is insisting that thousands of registration forms on which a citizenship box is not checked are invalid, even though elsewhere on the forms each applicant has sworn that he or she is a citizen. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was insisting until recently that any registration form that came in on anything less than 80-pound paper stock had to be rejected. The continued disenfranchisement of convicted felons in many states also has an unmistakable racial component.
The suppression of minority votes has continued because it is perceived as a winning tactic, and because it is rarely punished. This needs to change.
Trying to prevent members of minorities from voting can be a violation of federal and state law. Election officials, poll watchers and voters should be on the lookout for vote suppression, and should report it. And prosecutors should look for criminal cases to pursue. A few high-profile prosecutions of political operatives, and even elections officials, would go a long way toward ending a disgraceful American tradition.
Republican dirty tricks.
We talk about the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan like the US democracy is working wunnerfully. How disgusting!
