Thursday, March 02, 2006

If you don't care, stay home

My fellow MJS community columnist and blogger Dean Mundy has a column in tomorrow's paper about improving voter turnout. Dean is, indeed, a thoughtful conservative but I have a somewhat different question.

Why should we care about increased voter turnout?

If you don't care enough about the issues to make 15 minutes in your day to vote, it is unlikely that you made 15 minutes to inform yourself on what you are voting about. Better to stay home. If there are too many elections and you have become burned out, odds are that you are burned out on learning who is running and why.

I am opposed to artifical barriers to voting but requiring that you make half an effort is not artificial. What I think is more important is engaging people in the issues. Then they will vote. But if they are not engaged, I'd just as soon they pass.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't care about increased voter turnout.