Let’s stop cocking around and just let people vote in peace.
** Hoping for posthumous damnation is a fool’s errand. Better to do it now.
This will the last post for 2025. I’ll be back in the first week of January. For now, let’s talk about voting.
In this meh land of ours, voting has always been restricted. One by one, restrictions based on sex, creed, color, religion, land ownership, and hair color have been removed. Today, what’s supposed to happen is that everyone over 18 gets to vote if they want to. It’s not that anyone has the “right” to vote; it’s just that they can. Registering to vote is not in the Constitution because, for some reason, each state has its own rules on how to handle a national election.
For those who know nothing about the law of this country, let me restate: the individual states manage the federal election. And they’ve never done particularly well at the process.
In a presidential election, for example, no one votes for the office of the presidency. No one, that is, except for the electors within the state. They are who voters choose, not the actual man or woman running for office. Arcane, certainly; obsolete, definitely; popular, not at all. And yet, that’s the current, keep-the-elitists-happy law.
If there were no electoral system, so they say, candidates would never visit county fairs in sparsely populated states. They’d go where the most people are. As of 2024, the ten most populated metropolitan statistical areas in the United States are:
The total population of these ten areas alone comes to 85,662,785. Let’s round that up to 86 million, given that the numbers are almost two years old. While this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, the most votes a candidate for president has ever received is 81.3 million, and that was President Biden in 2020. In the 2024 election, the winner received 77.3 million votes.
Elites bend over backwards trying to justify the 250-year-old voting system put into place by countering that candidates really should have to have that apple pie in the diner in the middle of a town of 2,000 people because, you know, America. Or rather, Amurrica.
It’s dumb. Other countries do democracy much better.
And it’s caused billions of wasted campaign dollars, time, health, and invited corruption from all levels. Purveyors of a kakistocracy (government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state) see the value in it. They can manipulate laws to suit their own purpose, especially when they’re craftier and shrewder than the lawmakers themselves.
One of the things that states like to do, even though the results affect the nation as a whole, is decide who gets to vote. Most of White America seems to hate it that Black Americans vote, for example, so they do whatever they can to make it really difficult.
Where voting is an in-person event, polling places in poor Black neighborhoods are scarcer than supermarkets (another issue, but not for this column). 40 out of 50 states reduced the number of polling places in 2020 and did so again in 2024. Somehow, though, there are a plethora of polling places in White neighborhoods with no real lines to speak of. In the Black neighborhoods, voters have to wait in line for hours, and because it is not a federal holiday, they miss work, lose wages, and feel hopeless.
Which is the whole point of having only a smattering of polling places in Black neighborhoods.
It’s also why many White folks are having cows left and right about mail-in voting. They do it themselves, mind you, and there has been no evidence about any voter fraud happening because of it, but the White folks hate mail-in voting. How can they intimidate voters at polling places if there are no polling places, just mailboxes?
In 2002, I went to a polling place in a Black neighborhood in Alabama. Or rather, the only polling place for miles around. It was a middle school gymnasium. Parked at the only entrance was a pickup truck, complete with rednecks sitting calmly in the back. Instead of holding guns, they held cameras. They took pictures of every single person who walked in, heckling them with obscenities and warnings.
No one took action. The police — both state and local — were conspicuously absent. They even took a picture of me. And from what they said, I’m a lover of something that begins with N. I decided to take it as a compliment.
This kind of thing happens in neighborhoods across the country. The only prerequisite is that the constituents be poor and not White.
Let’s just get rid of this voting system. It’s never really worked all that well. In fact, the current country is rated as the 26th best democracy in the world, not, as some politicians opine, the greatest country in the world. We’re tucked in between Malta and Chile. Part of this particular flawed democracy is that we have White folks continually trying to stop other people from voting.
Stop it.
Let’s just have a federal system of voting for federal office, namely the presidency and the vice-presidency. Everybody else can be subject to a state system. Let’s get rid of the electoral college, which is, at best, adorable, and at worst, caused the candidate with fewer votes to somehow win the election twice in my 26-year-old son’s lifetime alone.
Let’s make all voting for the presidency and vice presidency done by mail. All of it. It works in Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii (the areas from which form the new country of Pacifica, at least if you sign the Declaration of Independence); in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Vermont, and the District of Columbia (which brings up the taxation without representation argument about why DC isn’t just a state already, and name it Douglass after Frederick, not Columbia after Christopher).
Let the candidates just go to the most populated cities to campaign if they want. Why? BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE THE PEOPLE ARE. Duh. The presidency is not the president of a whole bunch of land. This country was supposed to be about “we the people,” not “we the cornfields.” At least I read that somewhere.
No more poll tests, taxes, ID scams, or bunko artists and conspiracy theorists howling that elections are rigged without an ounce of proof. No more “election night late coverage.” Everybody votes, it takes at least a week to get all the votes counted, and then we have a result. It’s not hard. It’s just fair. And fairness is the enemy of concentrated power.
It’s the country’s lack of fairness that ranks us #26. Lack of equity. Lack of compassion. And its love of elitist White [pseudo-]Christian power. There have been almost zero cases of voter fraud. We’re not preventing anything bad (despite the lies, damn lies, and statistics being spread by right-wing media commentators) by just letting people vote.
In our new country of Pacifica, that’s what we’re going to do. But until that happens, can we of the DSA just let as many people who want to vote do so without restriction?
Meanwhile, have a happy and safe New Year. I’ll catch you on the other side, on the terrifyingly familiar day of January 6th.
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