by Peg Cucci
My friend Trudy has an embroidered “Tuit” hanging on her kitchen wall.

It is round and lovely. She explained that she is almost always timely in her actions now, since her excuse has been removed.
She, like me, used to say, “I have to get around to it.” Now, she has one.

Perhaps we need to issue Federal, State and Local Round Tuits instead of voter registration cards. Voter apathy is getting me down.
“Use it or lose it,” is the phrase I’d like to see employed in voter registration. After three consecutive elections in which a registered voter fails to cast a ballot, their voting rights would be suspended until they reactivated them by re-registering either by mail or in person.

Nothing enhances the value of something like threatening to take it away. Dead sod in your lawn becomes valuable when your neighbor threatens to dig it up under the cover of dark. I’ll bet people would vote in droves if they believed their right to vote could be suspended by apathy. It couldn‘t hurt. We can hardly become more apathetic voters than we are.

The right climate
And, actually, there may be some truth to the threat. If we don’t routinely exercise our right to vote for the candidates of our choice, we have lost, not the right to vote, but the chance to vote right, as we see it.

Cynics would say, “So What?” They would argue that the loss is trivial and not worth mentioning in the face of our current political climate.

The problem with that argument is that it equates political climate with physical climate. You really can’t do anything about the weather, friends, but you really can do something about politics. You can vote. You can talk to your family and friends and encourage them to vote. You can volunteer in a campaign in which you believe and you can run for office in places where you would be able to make a difference.

I have had this conversation with several people lately. No one agrees with me that suspending a person’s right to vote for non-use is a good idea. I don’t remember putting it to a vote, but apparently I did. The idea lost, but in its place a bunch of other ideas were posited.

What’s with November?
First, it was suggested that a large part of the problem is that we vote on weekdays. Why do we do that? I was told that in Europe voting is held on week-ends, over several days, and the turnout is substantially higher. It makes sense. If we make elections day a week-end day maybe more people will show up.

Also, what’s with November? The suggestion was made to change the time of year we hold national elections. You can pretty much count on abysmal weather in November in my home state, Minnesota, and those surrounding it. In Texas it may be an unimportant detail, but in North Dakota it may be life threatening. Of course, bad weather can occur anytime, but November is a gimme in many states. Why not move national elections to a more reasonable time of year?

These ideas are founded in the notion that more people would like to vote than do and that if we made it more convenient to do so they would avail themselves of the opportunity. I don’t know if that’s true, but what harm would it do to work with the idea and test the theory?

And then there’s the poll tax, or non-poll tax to be precise. Your vote or $10. You get to choose which one you want to use. If voting rates stay as they are, we’ll have the national debt paid of in not time. At least, with that system, there would be some societal benefit to apathy.

I wish I had gotten this article posted in time for the last November election. I just didn’t get around to it.

Peg Cucci can be reached at Cucci6@aol.com.

 

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