Be Counted! We the People Are Counting on You!

Election day is next Tuesday.  Are you registered?  Have you made your picks?  Please remember to show up.  Without your vote, the candidates you favor least have a better chance of winning.

I’m serious.  Time and time again, candidates have won in a “landslide” because far too many people didn’t show up.  In 1980 many media outlets reported that Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter in a “landslide”.  The “real’ winner was “none of the above”!  Ronald Reagan came in a distant second with 27% of the eligible voters; 47% didn’t bother to show up.

In many ways 2000 was a ridiculous election.  Because of the electoral college system, George Bush won with 47.9% of the votes compared to Al Gore’s 48%.  Some people claim that Ralph Nader gave the election to Bush.  Would those who voted for Nader have voted at all?  Bush had 537 votes over Gore; 2,912,790 to 2,912,253.  Nader had over 90,000 votes, a tiny count compared to the no-shows.

Drat!  For years I’ve depended on the Election Project at George Mason University for turnout figures.  It is no longer available, and even many of the cached pages are no longer available.

According to the Florida Secretary of State’s office, turnout in 1980 was 70.1%.  That is, over 2.6 million registered voters didn’t bother to show up.  The de facto “none of the above” certainly swamped Nader votes.  We really don’t know if the Nader voters would have voted for Bush or Gore or stayed home.

Ah! I just dug deeper and Prof. Michael McDonald has taken his Election Project to the University of Florida.  See www.electproject.org.  McDonald claims that over four million eligible Florida voters didn’t show up (he’s counting eligible rather than registered).  Both Bush and Gore came in a distant second to “I don’t give a damn.”  That’s a helluva way to run a country.

Are you following the polls?  I say don’t bother because polls don’t determine elections.  You showing up can turn polls on their head.  Think about the 1948 post-election headline: “Dewey wins!”  The papers rushed to publish based on a telephone poll showing Dewey ahead.  However, the pollsters didn’t compensate for many Democratic voters not having telephones.

Even polls that claim to call people on landlines and cellphones may be missing an important clue.  Many people have caller ID; if they don’t know the caller, they don’t answer.  Have you seen any polls that mention the no response rate?

Another classic example of polls really missing the mark was the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election.  The polls had Skip Humphrey in the lead, Norm Coleman second, and Jesse Ventura last.  The results were Jesse Ventura winning, Norm Coleman second, and Skip Humphrey last.  I think that Jesse Ventura’s complaint about the auto-emission testing stations and the high taxes on his fancy cars resonated with a lot of drivers.  You can rest assured that somebody didn’t design their poll well.

Many rightfully complain about all the money in politics.  But the high spenders don’t always win.  Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, former CEOs of major tech companies, spent oodles of their own money to run for office in California,  Neither was elected.

Big spenders who lose are not confined to either party.  I had the pages up the other day which gave the spending by each party in the Presidential elections.  Surprise, the bigger spender wasn’t always the Republican candidate.  And when the bigger spender was a Democrat, he didn’t always win the general election, hanging chads or not.

A practice that has really gotten worse in recent years is the attack ads.  Candidate Joe will raise your taxes even mo’.  Candidate Tom doesn’t beat the drum for the military enough.  Candidate Bill didn’t spend enough on infra-structure (never mind that he did vote for a ten percent increase).  The silliest I’ve seen is that Al Franken voted with the President 85% of the time.  Duh!  When Bush was President, how often did Republican members of Congress vote with the President?  I would hope it was not 100% but definitely between 75% and 90%.

We can avoid many attack ads by not watching TV but they appear on billboards, in the newspapers and even on web pages.  I was surprised to see a silly attack ad on a web page against Stewart Mills who is running for Rick Nolan’s Congressional seat.  It was on a web site of a Wisconsin company!  The web knows whether you have been naughty or nice.

The purpose of attack ads is not to get you to vote for the attacker but to not show up at all.  Gosh!  I thought Sen. Foghorn was a great guy, but I guess I won’t bother showing up to vote for him this year.

So, what’s a poor confused citizen to do with all this obfuscation.

First, find all the neutral sources you can for information.  I know, there aren’t many of those.  About the best we can do is to read the candidates’ own statements in newspapers or on the web.

Second, show up and vote.  The only votes that don’t count are the votes not cast.

If you believe in democracy, you must be part of the demos, that is the people.

Mel hopes that he has to wait in line to vote.

This also appears in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/10/30/4267_be_counted_we_the_people_are_counting_on_you

Quote of the day – Republicans crazy, Democrats useless, and we're shafted

The full quote is the book title: "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted" by Mike Lofgren, a former Republican staffer.

You can read a short interview with Mike Lofgren at http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/former-congressional-staffer-how-money-divides-politics.

The 1% may have the money but the 99% have the votes!

I thought of the above phrase last night after a "debate" between a Tea Party supporter and an Occupy Movement participant.  See "Respectful discussion covers Occupy, Tea Party movements", Mike Creger, Duluth News Tribune, 2012-05-04.

After the main discussion, audience members were allowed two minutes each to speak.  I reminded people that all recent presidents and many other elected official received the votes of only a minority of eligible voters.

After I spoke, I pondered the common complaint that elections are bought.  Come on!  Are we a bunch of zombies who follow some evil master?  If we consider ourselves free agents, then we should go to the polls and vote for the candidates we prefer, write in somebody, or leave it blank.  If more of us voted, the expensive campaigns may become meaningless.  In fact, there have been cases where the candidate who spent the least won the election.

Elections are good for the economy, let's have more

Daniel Gross wrote that elections pump a lot of money into the economy, almost all of it spent domestically.  According to Open Secrets http://www.opensecrets.org, over $3.6 billion dollars has been spent on the 2010 campaigns as of 15:40 CDT, 26 October.  Watching their meter, I'd guess $1,000 is being spent every 13 seconds.

See Quantitative Electioneering, Yahoo!Finance, 2010-10-26.

We're getting the best candidates money can buy!

Fighting back on the overturning of corporate campaign spending

The Supreme Court overturned precedent about granting "political speech" to corporations, unions, and other organizations, "Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits", New York Times, 2010-01-21.

I find it very interesting that the "conservatives" who were appointed by presidents from a party that proclaims it is for individual liberty gives greater liberty to corporate interests.

We can't do much about various groups promoting or panning candidates, especially candidates for whom few of the members of the group can vote. But we can refuse to vote for candidates who accept contributions from groups or from people who have no right to vote for that candidate. And we can let them know why we won't vote for them.

Too often we as a people make voting an either/or proposition; we must vote for one of the major party candidates or we will be "throwing our vote away". It is way past time to stand up and be counted in a different way.

If any candidate for whom you might vote accepts contributions from those who can't vote for him or her, write and tell that candidate that you will vote for somebody else or leave that spot on the ballot blank. Maybe you will make no difference for an election cycle or two, but we have to start someplace. If you tell your friends and relatives what you did, if you write letters to the editor about what you did, maybe, just maybe the idea will catch on.

If you vote for the same old, same old, is it really democracy? Real democracy starts with individuals making their voices heard, not with sheep following the herd.

Campaign finance reform, a different idea

Stifle big money in politics! Don't infringe on political speech! Back, forth, up, down, and around go the arguments for and against any attempt to control the amount of money going into political campaigns. The one thing everybody appears to agree on is that it have become very expensive.

One of the ideas floated is that there should be free time on TV for political candidates. Free to who? The broadcasters would resist, rightly so, the mandating of giving away time, especially prime time. If the time was subsidized by the federal government, what rate should apply?

Why not reserve a couple of channels to be operated by the federal government? To qualify for use of the channel, candidates would need to get so many signatures, an existing requirement to be on the ballet in many states now.

The government would break the time into short, medium, and long spots randomly throughout the day. Then it would assign spots randomly each day to qualifying candidates. It would be up to the candidates to either appear live or provide a tape for their spots. The candidates could change their tapes as often as they wish. These spots would also be made available on the web.

The financing would be by the income tax checkoff as is now done to allocate public funds to candidates.