The School Bored

School Bored
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I heard a rumor they held an election in Los Angeles, but I can’t find any witnesses. Out of the 1,423,000 registered voters in L.A. County only about 109,000 actually cast a ballot. That’s 8/10s of 1%. They get a bigger crowd at a Justin Timberlake rap concert. More people were involved in fathering Anna Niccole Smith’s baby. More people worked on the election than bothered to vote in the election!
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Did you know that under California Election Code Section 14000 your boss is supposed to give you up to 2 hours paid time off so you can vote? Yeah, I didn’t know that either: nobody does – It’s the law and yet it’s a secret. And your boss is supposed to post a notice saying this at least two working days before every election. That’s another secret. But I figure that even if most people knew about the law, they still probably wouldn’t vote because it turns out that voting is like having kids: if your parents didn’t do it you probably won’t either.
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According to the California Voter Foundation 6.4 million Californians are “infrequent voters”, and while 94% of them admit that voting is important, 65% say family is a major influence on whether they vote, while 59 % say their friends influence them, and 32% said they were just too stupid to even answer the question. Okay, I made that last number up, but you see what I mean. What we need to do is hand out birth control pills to every voter who brings their kids with them .That will bring out enough desperate, sleep deprived parents to swamp the poll workers. And it will prepare the next generation of citizens.
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Of course the law says voters cannot receive anything of value in exchange for their vote, but I’m not sure this whole “honest elections” thing is working out. In 1960 voter participation was 72%. By 2004, with worries that “unqualified” people were voting, that had fallen to 64%, and that was up 4 points over the election of 2000. Hey, the whole point of universal suffrage is that we’re all unqualified! Now, in some states, you have to show a photo id, which cuts the already anemic voter participation another 3%, and nobody ever claimed a fraud rate as high as 3%. The fewer people who bother to vote the more difficult we make it for them. Wouldn’t the easiest way to reduce the influence of voter fraud be to increase the number of actual voters?
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As Melissa Etheridge wrote, “Everybody’s got a reason, to abandon their plan.” And this is mine. According to the City Ethics Panel, contestants for seats on the LAUSD board collectively spent $1, 807,908.56 to win part time jobs that pay less than $25,000 a year. That means that each vote cost $1,658.63, and this was just the primary. The ‘real’ election is coming up in May. Has all that money really found the very best people to run a monolith that is bigger than half the companies on the Fortune 500 list, and serves almost as many meals per day as Mickey D’s? Yeah, I don’t think so either
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So, we cut voter apathy by cutting out the middle man. We return to the days when people sold their votes for the right reasons; not because they felt better about themselves for voting for one candidate over another but because they WERE better, as in richer. I am suggesting we dump all the over paid media consultants and experts and just slip each voter a bribe of $1,600 apiece. Could the mess at LAUSD really be worse off with some “honest” crooks running things?
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But we’ll never do it. Confession might be good for the soul but it doesn’t win many elections. The truth is that being a voter is like dating a man. First they are all flash. Then they agree with everything we say. Once they’ve seduced us into the voting booth they max out our credit cards, trash our apartment, and then we don’t hear from them again until the next election. This isn’t democracy it’s domestic abuse.
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And in a sick horribly depressing way it works. As Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government on earth, except for all the others.” But only if the voters keep coming back for more abuse, otherwise this would no longer be a representative form of government. It would be lesbianism.
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And we all know that doesn’t work.
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Kimit Muston is a freelance writer living in Indiana. For six years he wrote a weekly column for the Los Angeles Daily News and has been published by the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oklahoma Oklahomian, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is a regular contributor to the web site Daily Kos.
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