RateItAll: The Opinion Network

This is Jim Crow.

Crow! Man, do I have a nasty cough. Last I checked, a voter is a voter, no matter how stupid he is. Lets keep it that way. Besides, if I got an extra vote for being smarter than everyone it would make people jealous.

True, most people are woefully ill-informed about politics, and it takes mental effort to swim against the deluge of celebrity event coverage, sporting results, and so on to actually find your position within the political landscape. It takes even more effort to form a view which has not already been badly tainted by the media through which you were informed in the first place. Passing a pop-quiz of politics is also meaningless, I would think. A pop-quiz level knowledge of politics is about what many people achieve, and it is this pop-quiz level of knowledge that is pandered to in political commercials, which focus on the sensational and try to paint inherently nuanced political issues in bold colours to suit their particular agendas. There is no point sitting in ivory towers and bemoaning the fact that people are so ill-informed, so as I see it, the challenges are (a) to make real politics interesting and engaging to the average person, without taking recourse to sensationalism and exaggeration (now theres a challenge indeed! any ideas??) and (b) to level the playing ground for political advertizing, so that the battle for minds is not based so heavily on the funding of the players.

Why does being over thirty-five get you a point? Will I become exponentially smarter when I reach that apparently special cut-off? What about people over seventy? Do they lose a point? And if I lose points for my age shouldn't I get one for my height? How about my shoe size? I could clean up on that one. This is crazy.

Horsesh#t of the highest order.

I think that anyone who draws a payment or salary from a government should lose the right to vote for the representatives of that government. People like me who receive social security should not be able to vote for the representatives to raise my loot. If you have a government contract, sorry. If you receive farm subsidies, SSI, disability, welfare, or if you work for a government, sorry. I realize that this would reduce the electorate, but something needs to be done before we spend ourselves into oblivion. Then the pols would have to run around to the people who were not on the public tit and convince them of the greatness of the new spending plans.

Democracy is presupposed upon the concept that free citizens inform themselves of political issues and matters of national and local concern, and then vote for the officials who best represent their viewpoints. Unfortunately, this is simply not the case in America. More US citizens are likely to be able to tell you who Jennifer Lopez has been romantically involved with during the past 5 years than name the congressmen representing their districts and Senators for their states. More registered voters can name more characters from Friends than current Supreme Court Justices. Consequently, we currently have a political system wherein voters are attracted to candidates and ideas like consumers are to brands of soda and automobiles. Sound bites rule the airwaves and bumper sticker thinking is the rule rather than the exception. Why does the candidate who has the most commercials almost always win elections? Because commercials work. Most Americans have been socialized to be consumers rather than thinkers. The following is designed to give additional weight to the votes of persons who are more likely to have critical thinking skills and are more heavily invested in society. The Scaled Voting System: A) Every person's vote is worth a minimum of 5 points B) 1 extra point for landowners C) 1 extra point for being 35 years of age or older D) 1 extra point for earning a bachelors degree from a nationally accredited 4 year college or university. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this system is that it would do away with the need for term limitations.