BAH! Voting should be voluntary, but it should be a priority. Voting is a form of action. (Griff will say force!) Not voting can hardly be justified as protest: that inaction is meaningless and a non comment. Sounds like cynical, justified lazy to me- or perhaps it truly is that no issues are alarming enough to merit your attention. If you cant find a candidate, write one in or write your disgust on the ballot- thats a protest action. Better yet, get involved in primaries and use your vote to protest before as candidates are selected. Of course it takes some effort.

As for fitting voting into your schedule...I'd like to see a national day off, and service workers should be scheduled and allowed time off for voting duty just as in the case of jury duty. Most every work place I've been associated with, public and private, (in PA, TX, and MN) has allowed and promoted time to vote.

I realize it justifies laziness, but until there's a box marked 'abstain,' I can't support compulsion in voting. The only way to abstain is to just not go.

And, yeah, I agree that it should be a priority. I think, however, that the whole system of polling places needs to be changed. (Look at this diary of an election worker for an example of the system.) If I'd been met with a 3 hour wait, frankly, I would have left. I don't have an extra 3 hours in my day for anything, and I think most Americans have too hectic of a schedule for it. So I don't know what would be better, but something needs to be done to upgrade the system.

I vote for a day off!

I'll give up Martin Luther King Jr Day off to get Election Day off. I think he'd approve. I never thought MLK Jr would approve of a day of sloth to honor him but he WOULD approve of a day for blacks (and everyone else) to go exercise their right to vote for which he struggled so hard.

Brian

And appropos of the "trust/don't trust the people" subthread (about which our resident Young Turks have been strangely silent since I pointed out the difference between Hamilton and Jefferson), what should wander into my in-box from that cute guy Krikket (the tall one with the long hair) who appeared with us on the news last night...

"Cheerful Libertarianism"

"Instead of railing how stupid our fellow citizens have been, Cheerful Libertarianism congratulates them on how far they managed to come using such gross and inefficient tools! During a century when communists and fascists and religious fanatics waved vicious-hypnotic ideological romanticisms around, Americans chose instead to follow Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Hey, they were statists, but we got the roads and dams and universities, managed to end Jim Crow and got cleaner air... all without crushing entrepeneurialism to death."

http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-102802A