4th of July Hypocricy (was: OT Celebration)

From: joe <rigdonj_at_intellistar.net>
Date: Fri Jul 6 19:55:20 2001

At 03:05 PM 7/6/01 -0700, Don wrote:


>On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, joe wrote:
>
> > At 10:05 AM 7/6/01 +0930, you wrote:
> >
> >
> > > > I think the most offensive law in Oz is the requirement that all
> > >citizens vote.
> > >
> > >Mixed reaction to that here. At least the govt is elected by virtually
> > >all of the eligible voters.
> > >It's mildy amusing that less than half of eligible voters in US
> > >elections actually bother to vote.
> >
> >
> > FWIW in the last election, some precients here in Florida had more
> > than a 97% turnout. My person opinion, if someone is too lazy to register
> > and/or vote I don't want them voting anyway. In the last election, the
> > democrats realized that they were in trouble here in Florida and they
> > issued a last minute plea for more "mininories" to get out and vote at the
> > last minute. That's what lead to a lot of the voter confusion and
> > un-counted votes. Many of those last minute voters had never registered
> > and most of them didn't even know that they had to go to a voting place IN
> > THEIR OWN DISTRICT. They simply went to the first voting palce that they
> > found and DEMANDED to vote. Of course, they were turned away and told that
> > they had to vote in their own district but since they hadn't bothered to
> > even find out were that was they ran out of time before they could vote.
> >
> > Joe
>
>IMHO, that is a pretty good analysis of at least part of the problem,
>Joe. It is my belief that the Congress, what with `motor voter' et al,
>has made it far too easy to vote. The net result being a vast number of
>voters who have not the slightest notion of who or what they are voting
>for or why as they have not spent thirty seconds thinking about it
>before appearing at the polls.
>
>Likely the very old rule that only property owners had the right to vote
>deserved to be overturned, but it certainly put a more thoughtful group
>of voters at the polls.
> - don

      Mind you that that was only part of the voting problem here in
Florida. The Democrats considered Florida a MUST-WIN state and thought that
they'd have an easy win here. However when the polls started showing a very
close race, they appealed to every pro-democratic group that they could
find by using scare tactics like telling senior citizens that GWB was going
to repeal medicare outright. Of course most people realized that was pure
hogwash but it worked on a lot of people and they rushed out to vote.
(That's one reason that we had such a large turnout.) However many of the
same idiots that believe such nonsense were the same ones that had never
bothered to vote before and many of them didn't even know that you couldn't
vote for more than one person per office. The result was that we got
thousands of ballets that weren't punched at all or were punched multiple
times for the same race!

       Personally I'd like to see the competency tests brought back and I'd
like to see it written so that potential voters would have to at least have
some knowledge of the issues and candidates. But if we did that there'd be
a whole lot less Democrats being elected! Stop and think about it, who
pushed through the motor-voter act? Who pushed through the law to change
the minimum age for voting? In both cases it was the Democrats because
they would have the most to gain from those changes.

     Joe
Received on Fri Jul 06 2001 - 19:55:20 BST