Getting Out The Vote Wasn't This Easy Back In The Day

Back in 1972, when I worked on George McGovern’s quixotic run against the criminal Nixon, we used landline phones to call registered voters, reminding them to vote and offering rides to the polls.

The technology of the 21^st century has changed that. If you’re registered, you can vote in the privacy of your own home. And you don’t have to guess if you’re registered.

Of course there’s still room for the human touch; I just addressed 25 postcards to female no-party-registered voters, asking them to vote. Not to vote for someone, just to vote.

I have mentioned before  my streak of bad luck; I helped Wayne Morse lose his Senate seat, Art Pearl to lose his run for Oregon governor, Bobby Kennedy to lose the Oregon Primary, and, of course McGovern.  I think I’m a jinx, so if TFG had a ground operation in California, I’d sign up.

One other quick note. The Bill Of Rights contains only one responsibility: jury duty. Clearly, voting is another responsibility. But the founding fathers didn’t bother to mention it because they couldn’t imagine anyone who had the right to vote not voting. After all, that was the whole point of the American Revolution. This simply demonstrates their lack of imagination.

Comments

[Robert E. Malchman]

Given that women and Blacks, and in some places, non-property-owning white men, were barred from voting, I'm not surprised that individual voting isn't mentioned in the original Constitution or Bill of Rights. Indeed, mentioning "voting" there would have been akin mentioning "rope" in the house of the hanged.

Do not kid yourself: This nation was not founded or designed on the basis of democracy. It was designed for rich, white men to have a more or less equal say among themselves in what happened to them and to the women and enslaved people they controlled. 248 years later, we're far from having fixed that completely, and about 40 percent or so of the country would like us to go back to that system.