Mandatory Voting vs. The 1500 Character Reply Limitation

People certainly like to tell other people what to do.

That sentence sums up the results of my ‘personal observation poll’ which consists entirely of what I think I hear from political campaigns in tiny municipalities across America.

That bit about ‘telling others what to do’ is, in fact, the flaw in our system of representative democracy through ‘the right to vote’. The average voter (rightly) asks his chosen politician to carry forth the will of an empowered citizen.

Each voter sees the nature of their enfranchisement as integral to the ‘bucket brigade’ approach to local and national politics: individually their involvement in the ‘dousing of issues’ is invisible, yet collectively this voter and all the others keeping time to the same beat can influence and change the world around them. And nobody ‘ordered’ them to undertake such global sway…

If memory serves me, wasn’t there a cartoon strip entitled, “There Otta’ Be A Law!”… and wasn’t that cartoon a parody of the impulse so many of us have to tailor the behavior of those around us so that their lives  more closely resemble our lives… 

There is comfort in familiarity and there is hardly anything more familiar than our own clone. So, in an effort to confirm the self proclaimed rightness of our own values we ask that others behave as we do and hold dear the same ideals as we.

In the absence of voluntary compliance, one could legislate that failure to comply constitutes a punishable crime against the state.

This is one way to be sure that citizens exercise their freedoms.