Election Choices: What to Do Instead
[Escape from New York delayed completion of this post this until after election night. All the better. Now that the great danger has been dodged, let’s look to the future. Advisories: 1) I’m talking here about presidential elections. 2) You really have to see the videos.]
Having made the case against voting for Obama in a previous post, it’s only fair for me to suggest the alternative.
I value the right to vote as fundamental. I have seen how people who don’t have that right fight for it, and how people who get it for the first time eagerly embrace it, and go to extraordinary lengths to use it. Although I consider electoral politics only one aspect of a thoroughgoing democratic polity and of individual democratic engagement, it would be hard to conceive of a democratic schema, no matter how revolutionary, in which a transparent, trusted voting process was not important. It may be one among many, but a vote is an important political tool/weapon, and a terrible thing to waste.