Another Thought on Voting: The Offset

A fictional, though believable voting situation:

Georgie and Georgia are two loving spouses who have many things in common but inherently disagree when it comes to politics. One is a left wing sympathizer, the other is a right wing supporter. They go go vote and, guess what?, their votes cancel each other out completely. So... What's the point to their voting?

Okay, yes, every vote counts and it is important to have your say in an election, but if one person's vote is going to be cancelled out by another person's vote like G and G in the above example, perhaps it's just a waste of time for these particular people to go out and vote. Their votes offset one another and basically for them to go out of their way and spend precious time and resources to press a couple of buttons seems counterproductive in their minds. And they'd probably be right in some regards.

But, if we were to institute a simple and easy system for citizens to vote quickly and easily, perhaps online, then it would do no harm for these two people to vote, even if their votes do offset one another.

Here are more reasons why people would be happy to avoid voting:
-it takes too long
-it wastes gas to drive to polling location
-out of town that day
-sick
-terrible weather
-too busy
-etc., etc.

My point here: the act of voting expends too many resources, and people can easily find a reason to not vote and thus save those resources. The easier and more efficient voting can be made, the less people need to worry about expending said resources. And we all vote happily ever after.

Let's Modernize the Voting System, Shall We?

Ok, I'm going to tell you one huge reason why voting-aged people don't vote in high numbers like they should....

They always say go in the morning to vote when there's less of a rush compared to after work. Okay, that's sensible. So on primary election day this past "Super Tuesday" I went over to the school where I vote, somewhere around 8:15. Well lucky me, all the buses are rolling in and all the parents who pay for the buses but don't want their kids riding on the buses are dropping their kids off at the front door. (Mind you it's a beautiful morning, there's no reason to be driving them as the young'ins could have comfortably stood outside, but that's a different story.) So anyway it took me a good 10 minutes just to be able to park my car in an out of the way spot and get into the building, after previously spending 10 minutes driving out of my way to get to the school. I then walked in and registered, and just as they said, there was no rush of people. So I go in the booth and press two measley buttons and leave-- one button for my candidate of choice, one to enter the vote. It took me another 5 minutes to get out, and then it added 10 minutes for me to get to work. So basically it took away 30-45 minutes of my life to press two buttons.

Now I'm not one to complain, but rather I'm looking out for the future of this country... is there no way, what with all of today's brilliant technology for people to be able to vote online, or something similar? Who wants to take a half hour or more out of their day to press two buttons? I know there are plenty of computer geeks out there who can come up with a secure solution to this outdated form of voting in person... there's GOT to be a better way to do this than our current system. And think about all of the productivity lost, gasoline wasted, and people's time manning the polls that is needlessly spent when sombeody could just as easily open his or her laptop, press a few keys and be done in 2.3 minutes flat.

The lesson here: make it easy and people will vote in record numbers, guaranteed. GUARANTEED!!!

And for those of you wondering, I voted for Pedro.