Dumbing Down the Electorate

With this election, fired up by the perceived injustice of Gore's loss in 2000, the happy minions of elite special intertests are making an unprecedented effort to 'get out the vote'. This is manifested in the media and even on your local streetcorners and at your front door by college students carrying clip boards with voter registration cards, by celebrities all over the talk circuit, by PSAs every few minutes and by special 'rock the vote' functions on the music networks. This is all presented as a great, altruistic, non-partisan effort to get more people to vote so that they'll become part of the political process. This is a good thing, right?

Consider why people don't vote for a second. Most people who don't vote aren't terribly politically oriented and are therefore not likely to have made themselves particularly politically knowlegable. If they can't bring themselves to make even the minimal effort to register, how much time are they likely to spend researching and informing themselves on the candidates or the issues? Most likely the only opinion they have is some vague alliegiance formed by something they heard on TV or some friend's comment, an irrational inclination towards a particular candidate, or the fact that their grandfather voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

People who really care about politics and who know about political issues are already registered and are self-motivated to vote. They may hold to all sorts of different positions, but they have usually given at least a little more than a casual thought to the issues and the process of voting. They have a sense of responsibility to the republic which people who aren't even registered to vote clearly lack.

In general, it is certainly desirable to get more people involved in the political process, but getting people to come out and vote is not the same thing as preparing them to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Just putting a ballot in the hands of an apathetic fool who has no real commitment to the process and no understanding of issues or what the candidates stand for is essentially a means of diluting the voter base and flooding the polls with tractable, ignorant sheep who will vote with the prevailing wind from the media or other even more questionable sources.

Of course, the biggest group of unregistered voters are those who have recently turned 18, a group who by and large are abyssmally uninformed, not yet free of the indoctrination of government schools, and completely unaware of the importance of the electoral process. MTV makes voting sound fun! Ashton Kutcher and the members of Yellowcard think we should vote! Ooh boy, let's go elect someone! No one is more tractable, more gullible or more easily swayed than an 18 year old with a voter registration card. If they see their celebrity idol telling them to register and vote, they do it. If they later see them on a talkshow or in an entertainment magazine telling them who to vote for then they do that too.

Desptie the non-partisan trappings of these 'get out the vote' efforts their real objective is transparent - get uninformed people who are easily swayed and wouldn't normally vote into the polls and direct them to vote for left wing candidates and causes. You don't see voter registration efforts targeting overworked executives and small business owners who may not have the time to get down to the polls and vote. You don't see them going after upwardly mobile, highly-educated immgrant groups. And you certainly don't see them yearning to recruit members of the military for whom voting can be awfully inconvenient. Their targets are young, ignorant and generally inexperienced with the real world - the kind of people who are heavily influenced by the media and are naive enough to swallow the sweet-tasting lies of liberalism and lack the experience or inclination to question the philosophy they are being spoon-fed.

So, when you see a 'get out the vote' PSA remember whose vote they're trying to get out and do what you can to counteract the dumbing down of the electorate. Explain the issues to a handy teenager. Encourage local entrepreneurs to take time off work to go and vote. Remind people that in a democracy majority rule can be disastrous if the country is ruled by a majority of fools and dupes - the majority liberal special interests are desperate to bring to the polls this November.