Clerk's Office and registered to vote. In those days you had to prove,
by a variety of acceptable means, who you were, when you were born, and
where you lived. You also had to read a few lines from the Constitution,
proving that you had a command of written English. And being a
registered voter meant that you had to pay an annual poll tax of some
minuscule amount that went toward funding the elections. I never had a
problem with any of that, and still don't.
In those days, machine politics was a major industry, particularly in
the big cities, and the ward bosses would arrange for people to be
transported to the polls to vote. The voters would, of course, be
advised as to their best choices, and might even receive a small stipend
for discharging their civic duties. It was well documented that in
Boston, at least, some people discharged their civic duties at more than
one polling place, and I have no doubt that the same occurred in many
other cities. It surely still does.
Today we spend millions printing ballots in a vast array of languages,
apparently so that people who can't read English can vote. Isn't English
a requirement for citizenship? Isn't voting reserved for citizens? Maybe
I missed the changes. But you can see how it would make it easy for the
ward bosses, or their functional equivalent, to influence the vote in
their communities.
And can you imagine boiler room operations signing up phantoms to
register and then to vote by mail? All it takes is money.
Voting is a responsibility of citizenship. Elections seldom happen at
less than two year intervals, and I can hardly imagine a situation in
which a person could not find one day to get to the City Clerk's Office
to register to vote after they reach voting age, in time for the next
election. If they can't arrange that, they aren't bright enough to make
an informed choice anyway, and we will benefit by them staying on the
sidelines.
And the same for voting. The polls are open early enough and late enough
so that, with very few exceptions, people with walking around smarts,
can figure out how to get themselves to the polls. Absentee ballots are
available for those who are away in the military or working overseas, or
who just know that they will be away on election day. That system is
already in place and is available to anybody who needs it.
We don't need to add mail in this or mail in that or register whenever
and wherever you want to the system. The only people who benefit from
that are those who are too stupid or too lazy to discharge their
citizen's duties under the system that has worked pretty well for a very
long time.
Oh, well, the other big beneficiaries will be the machine politicians.
They must be giggling like schoolgirls.
George Marold