ELECTORAL MADNESS

we got this from the Australians. really.
I'll cop to being one of those *cough cough* "coastal elites" who reads The New Yorker - with pride. For those who don't read the magazine, just known that historian Jill Lepore's essays are worth the price of purchase alone and recently, she wrote a wonderfully insightful and informative essay on the history of voting in America that I highly recommend to anyone interested in how our democratic process has worked (or failed to).

It's an oddly uplifting story in a way because if you realize how incredibly convoluted our voting history has been, all the way to present, you'll realize that 1) we've come a long way and 2) change and improvement is possible, even in an age of ACORN hysteria and Diebold paranoia.

One part of this that gave me a very long pause was reading how the "modern" standardization of a secret ballot, distributed by the gov't, had a very dark side which was its use to disenfranchise Black voters in the Jim Crow south South (a drive, lest we forget, lead by Southern Democrats against a then-Black Republican voting bloc) by establishing literacy requirements. In fact, Lepore argues that the wide adoption of this voting standard was driven, nationally, by a desire to prevent the poor, the illiterate and immigrants from having access to the ballot.

This should also serve as a reminder for why it's so important to vote next week. It's not the ultimate expression of one's civic duty or the drive towards social justice - but it is a starting point.

--O.W.