She rightly points out that while we pay a lot of attention to presidential election years, we pay far too little attention to mid-term elections and local and state elections, although these can have very significant consequences. The low voter turnout at such elections tends to result in horrible people getting elected to office.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Did you know that Washington State (as well as Oregon) has all-mail-in voting? I’m baffled by how convenient it is and why it hasn’t spread quicker. Washington State and Oregon have incredibly high voter turnouts and I certainly think mail-in voting is a reason. It’s almost difficult to not vote.
Democrats, as a constituency, are flighty, flaky, whiny and likely to stay home if their favorite candidate, or cause, fails to do as well as they thought they should. Like Burger King customers, they want it their way or they aren’t going to lift a finger to get anything short of their ideal. .
I’ve had Democratic neighbors fail to vote be cause. this is pretty close to an exact quote: ‘because it was such a nice day and my bro showed up with some sweet bud’. That comment was delivered after I went to his house to drive him to the polls and was directed to his friends house where I found them too stoned to focus their eyes, literally.
I vote pretty much a straight Democratic ticket every time I’m given a chance to vote. The one exception was when I personally knew the Democratic candidate to be a flaming jerk. Then I voted for the independent.
Republicans are jerks. But they vote.
Imagine you are concerned with the output of a duck.
One approach is to control the inputs into the duck.
Another approach is to control the duck food companies.
Another approach is to control the inputs into the duck food companies.
Another is to manipulate the duck.
Another is to replace the duck.
Every step along the process can be manipulated, or the process whereby it is scored can be manipulated, or the inputs into the process or scoring can be manipulated. Ad infinitum. This is why someone who thinks that money can be removed from politics is a fool: money is politics. The only way to solve this problem is to identify benefit targets, which is -- deliberately -- obscured.