What I said there was that, in that panel discussion there was a lot of people complaining about the lack of\u2014that many Americans aren't educating themselves about the issues and they are passive. It was important to\u2014and also that the voting participation was dropping. My position was that the underlying problem is the citizen who is not paying attention to public events, not educating themselves about the issues and so forth and that the non-voting is a symptom. I didn't see driving up participation as addressing the primary underlying problem. That was my point. I pointed out that when the constitution was adopted, the turnout was about 33%, my understanding. Then I said, low participation has been a problem from the very beginning. My view is that voter turnout shouldn't be artificially driven up without also addressing the issue of an informed citizen rate, which I think is a problem.<\/blockquote>\r\n
Now, on some level this isn\u2019t incorrect. If voting was mandatory, citizens would not respond by becoming better-informed. Voting turnout doesn\u2019t measure the information level of the populace, and if we want a better-informed populace, as we probably do, working toward increasing voter turnout is not a good way to do it.\r\n
On a much deeper, and much more important level, however, this attitude is very, very wrong. William Barr doesn\u2019t get to decide who is or is not sufficiently well-informed to vote<\/i>. Nobody gets to decide that for any other citizen. That\u2019s a vital principle to participatory self-government\u2014without that principle, elections are just another system of organizing the bureaucracy. Mr. Barr is going to be Attorney General of the United States, and it\u2019s important that he recognize this principle\u2014or at least that those of us who do recognize this principle make a noise about it.\r\n
The truth is that every anti-democratic restriction on who gets to vote is predicated on some notion that the excluded group is not worthy, somehow, of participating with the rest of \u2018us\u2019. Mostly, it was obvious that those groups were incapable of self-governance and intent on driving the deserving and decent citizenry into despair. They were poor people, illiterates, people of color, women, non-Christians, teenagers, rabble. They were the underlying problem, according to people very like William Barr.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger hocks a tchainik, again.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19900"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19903,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19900\/revisions\/19903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}