By now we’re all too well versed in the rhetoric and rationales.
* Negative campaigns drive down the vote. Thanks, again, Citizens United and a further coarsening of our political culture.
* Non-presidential years don’t motivate enough voters. Governors, amendments, legislators, mayors, judges, school board members aren’t big enough draws.
* Gerrymandering skews everything. You can’t take politics out of politics.
* But un-gerrymandered districts may now disincentivize some of the previously disenfranchised. We haven’t advanced far enough for Corrine Brown to still be competitive?
Enough. Even a more sophisticated, voter-suppression crowd can’t succeed without voter inertia. This can’t be anybody’s definition of “American Exceptionalism.”
Voting is a right and a responsibility.
The former means showing up or mailing it in. The latter means the former is not enough. It’s also about being informed–not outsourcing candidate choice to cherry-picked, cable-TV pundits or being clueless prey for some context-challenged, attack ad.
It’s about living up to our ideals. It’s about voting as if our democracy depended on it. It does.