Betcha they want blank ballots!
The Blue state of Illinois, an appendage of Chicago, is contemplating a bill to make voting compulsory (https://www.thecentersquare.com/illinois/article_701f6412-4507-44d0-901c-9e7b65cc095e.html).
Do I need to tell you this is a project hatched by Democrats?
What if you don’t like any of the candidates on the ballot and don’t want to vote for any of them? No problem! Blank ballots, that’s all it’ll take. In what must be the understatement of the year, a Republican rep called the scheme “a slippery slope.” Gee, ya think?
As yet there are no punishments attached to the bill; but they’re sure to come. Fine people for not voting. And of course that’ll be handled in an even-handed and fair way [32-minute break for sardonic laughter].
We ought to have a lottery to guess what’s next. Non-citizen voting? Wait, never mind, they’re already doing that.
Ridiculous. There are people who choose not to vote as a matter of conscience and, while that is not my choice, I believe that they should have that right. There are minor candidates, such as some county officials that I’ve been known to pass over entirely, and some ballot initiatives which are so filled with word salad that I don’t know what to make of them, so I abstain.
I don’t think of voting as a duty, per se. But I think of it as something that should be willingly done, with great appreciation for all that it means. Even when your chosen candidate loses, your vote still supports your candidate and does not contribute to a mandate for the candidate you didn’t support. In general, I vote a straight ticket, but I remain party unaffiliated.
Forcing people to vote is a policy I associate with dictators, petty tyrants in failed nations and banana republics. The gift of the American Republic was freedom. This gift has affected the entire world, and while it has not eliminated tyranny, it has put tyrants on notice, worldwide. Ever hear of the French Revolution?
The representative republic of the US was so earth-shaking that D’Tocqueville came here to study it and wrote Democracy in America. It was NOT an experiment, in spite of what I was taught by some of my public school teachers. It was a carefully crafted system that sought to balance powers and prevent tyranny. It works better than anything else I’ve seen, and a number of people have proffered the notion that God may have had a hand in this.
Michael Medved has written books on the subject of God’s Hand in America, and while I won’t give his ideas a blanket endorsement, he offers some very strong arguments and points out numerous instances where crucial junctures turned out for the good of the nation, many times in surprising ways which defied the odds.
But freedom doesn’t come from the founders of the US. D’Tocqueville famously wrote that America’s greatness was in America’s goodness. Good hearted people seeking the freedom to lead decent, productive lives are what made America a success.
2 Cor 3:17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
“America’s greatness was in America’s goodness”–oh, how we need to defend that!
Remember when children were safe in most places? When I was 11, I had the run of the town and nobody worried about me, and I was, indeed, safe. Nowadays you can’t even be certain that a schoolteacher can be trusted.
When I was a kid, we didn’t even lock our doors, except on vacation.
Parents in our neighborhood always kept an eye out for everybody’s kids. But that was then.
I’ve read where the voting in the Soviet Union days was almost 100% – vote or off to the gulag. If Bernie Sanders was able to vote in the USSR elections, you know he would have chosen to do so. Bernie even spent his honeymoon in Moscow.
It’s time he had another job.
I apologize to all my readers who have been made anonymous by WordPress. I don’t know how or why they did it, or how to fix it at my end.
As Major Hoople used to say… “Fap!”