by ....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I think we should declare election day a national holiday. We need a new one since it looks like we've lost Columbus Day to nit-picking concerns about genocide. We could call the new holiday, "Anti-Apathy Tuesday".
Actually election day already is a national holiday; just not in this nation. A guy named Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the English king and parliament in 1606. He was caught and tortured, and sentenced to be hanged until he was almost dead, then disemboweled and then drawn and quartered. And on every November 5th. since, "Guy Fawkes Day", the English have built bonfires, danced, and hanged Mr. Fawkes in effigy all over again. And they call us a violent culture.
It was no accident that in 1789 our founding fathers picked the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as our Federal election day; they were razzing old King George III one more time, saying that 200 years later Guy Fawkes' bomb had finally gone off.
Of course, 200 years after that the bomb seems to have fizzled a little. Every year more and more people who could vote, don't vote. And it doesn't do any good to point out that Adolph Hitler became leader of the Nazi party by one vote, or that a shift of a mere 600 votes would have made me class president. Well, maybe 700 votes. The number of people who vote is dropping faster than our children's reading scores.
We really need to fix this. We have to give people a reason to vote; civic duty, self interest, and common sense having failed to motivate them. Let's just declare election day a holiday and make voting a big party. We could give away door prizes. Or make it a lottery. Vote for the winner for all offices and propositions and win a billion dollars! Come on down! Who wants to be a billionaire?!
We can raise the prize money by just requiring that every dime spent on campaigns be matched with a dime for the prize pool. And the excess money... and there will be excess money. Do you have any idea how many billions are spent by politicians to win jobs from Maine to Hawaii every four years?...the excess money can go to build public schools or new hospitals. Elections could become a good thing. All those campaign dollars could be put to productive purposes; well, half of them, anyway.
Or maybe we could add an element of show biz. Every town could build a big wheel with all the public offices written on it, and after the polls close they could spin the wheel on live TV. The public office that ends up under the pointer would become the "Wild Card Office." The actual results for that election would be thrown out. Then a computer could pick one voter at random who would be instantly "elected" to that office. Who wouldn't show up to vote if there was a chance you could win a cushy government job? And we could finally put to the test the idea that any schmuck chosen at random could do as well as a people we elect.
Now, no system is perfect, and even my brilliant idea for tricking people into taking part in their own democracy has a weak point. People will, of course, attempt to turn "Anti-Apathy Tuesday" into a four day holiday and avoid voting by leaving town. But we can solve this problem easily by making the day before "National Drive a Car and Go to Jail Monday." Then all we have to do is open polls in the jails.
There will be those who argue that people who have to be tricked into voting will not be informed or involved enough to make rational choices. But let's face it, if we eliminated all the unqualified voters, the only people left at the polls would be you and me. Well, me, anyway.
Kimit Muston is a writer living inm Los Angeles. If you have comments about his columns, you can reach him by contacting - editor@inditer.com