On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, joe wrote:
At 10:05 AM 7/6/01 +0930, you wrote:
I think
the most offensive law in Oz is the requirement that all
citizens vote.
Mixed reaction to that here. At least the govt is elected by virtually
all of the eligible voters.
It's mildy amusing that less than half of eligible voters in US
elections actually bother to vote.
FWIW in the last election, some precients here in Florida had more
than a 97% turnout. My person opinion, if someone is too lazy to register
and/or vote I don't want them voting anyway. In the last election, the
democrats realized that they were in trouble here in Florida and they
issued a last minute plea for more "mininories" to get out and vote at the
last minute. That's what lead to a lot of the voter confusion and
un-counted votes. Many of those last minute voters had never registered
and most of them didn't even know that they had to go to a voting place IN
THEIR OWN DISTRICT. They simply went to the first voting palce that they
found and DEMANDED to vote. Of course, they were turned away and told that
they had to vote in their own district but since they hadn't bothered to
even find out were that was they ran out of time before they could vote.
Joe
IMHO, that is a pretty good analysis of at least part of the problem,
Joe. It is my belief that the Congress, what with `motor voter' et al,
has made it far too easy to vote. The net result being a vast number of
voters who have not the slightest notion of who or what they are voting
for or why as they have not spent thirty seconds thinking about it
before appearing at the polls.
Likely the very old rule that only property owners had the right to vote
deserved to be overturned, but it certainly put a more thoughtful group
of voters at the polls.
- don
Mind you that that was only part of the voting problem here in
Florida. The Democrats considered Florida a MUST-WIN state and thought that
they'd have an easy win here. However when the polls started showing a very
close race, they appealed to every pro-democratic group that they could
find by using scare tactics like telling senior citizens that GWB was going
to repeal medicare outright. Of course most people realized that was pure
hogwash but it worked on a lot of people and they rushed out to vote.
(That's one reason that we had such a large turnout.) However many of the
same idiots that believe such nonsense were the same ones that had never
bothered to vote before and many of them didn't even know that you couldn't
vote for more than one person per office. The result was that we got
thousands of ballets that weren't punched at all or were punched multiple
times for the same race!
Personally I'd like to see the competency tests brought back and I'd
like to see it written so that potential voters would have to at least have
some knowledge of the issues and candidates. But if we did that there'd be
a whole lot less Democrats being elected! Stop and think about it, who
pushed through the motor-voter act? Who pushed through the law to change
the minimum age for voting? In both cases it was the Democrats because
they would have the most to gain from those changes.
Joe