Voting Rights Cynicism
199 words. Letter to the editor.
Update after the 2022 mid-term elections: I think my thesis is correct. In many states, Republican candidates and election officials discouraged their voters from doing anything but voting in person on election day. Many of them lost as a result. Once they process that fact, I think they will go all in on early voting in 2024, and Democrats will discover vast inequities in the very procedures they have been championing lately.
Jennifer Rubin’s column of June 17 is, like so many others in support of federalizing voting procedures, the epitome of cynicism. None of them state the true goal: to make voting instantly available to the disinterested on election day. By “disinterested” I refer to people who will not take the simple steps to register in advance, who do not know the issues, and who will not stir themselves to go to the polls or to use an absentee ballot.
I think election laws will eventually be federalized. That’s too bad—for the Left. For the other side of the cynical coin is that the liberalization of registration and voting procedures, including universal absentee-on-demand, will benefit all sides equally. But all sides are not equal. Conservatives, being conservative, did not adopt mail-in and early voting in the same numbers as did liberals in 2020. Conservatives were stuck in a mindset that said that actually getting out to the polls meant something.
They found out that symbolic actions mean nothing. Only votes matter.
Republicans should vote unanimously for the Democrat voting law, and work to awaken their own formerly disinterested voters to the beauty of effortless voting on an industrial scale.
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