Early Endorsements Part II
Early endorsements probably don’t mean much of anything any more now that the limits on individual contributions are obscene. One person having the ability to contribute $10,000 to one candidate is outrageous. Unfortunately, I see our government officials being those individuals who can raise the most money and then spend it to reach the most people. We are definitely becoming a state of Haves and Have Nots.
I would like to think that voters are still the most important part of the process, but that seems more and more unlikely when HB3 is on the table and electronic voting is all the rage without the safeguards needed. Funny, how on one hand we were told to embrace electronic voting to ease long lines at the polling places and make it easier for people to vote, but on the other hand, we are now facing increasingly longer lines with the advent of the photo ID phase of our voting lives. Unfortunately, every day I see more and more voters who feel disenfranchised. More and more people tell me that their vote doesn’t count. I have worked for years on voter registration campaigns and when it is all said and done the impact it has is usually nominal. People do not like to say “no” so they will spend the time to fill out the registration card, but when the day arrives to go to the polls other factors are set in motion. The litany of “my one vote won’t count”, ” what’s the point none of the politicians care about me” and “my life won’t change no matter who is in office” begins, and the new voter or the old tired voter decides not to go to the polls and wait in a long line to cast a vote that they feel does not matter anyway.
Until we have true campaign finance reform and integrity restored to our election process, our voter base will continue to erode and we will have less and less people deciding who will govern us. We all need to work as hard as we can to prove to voters that one vote can make a difference and each and every vote is important. Early endorsements have a way of squelching this dialogue and make our task more difficult. So I agree that early endorsements should be discouraged vehemently.
January 10th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
One can suggest remedies to even the playing field in elections, such as campaign finance reform, the abolition of early endorsements, and holding all 50 primaries on the same day. But until election fraud is addressed, nothing else will matter. When the CEO of a major purveyor of electronic voting machines can openly vow to try to win the election for a certain candidate, and those machines are demonstrably easy to corrupt, and no paper trail is possible, but boards of election STILL buy that purveyor’s products, we have no hope of ensuring fair elections. While parties can manipulate elections all over the country simply by hacking into systems and altering results, then those people who say, “My vote doesn’t count,” are absolutely correct.