When you think about it, voting is such a pain in the ass. You have to listen to people you don’t know tell you stuff you don’t care about. You could just go into the booth, close your eyes and pull random levers (or touch random places on the screen, or punch random holes in cards or randomly do whatever other crazy action your state might ask you to do). You know there are so many more important things you could be doing with your afternoon, but people keep telling you it’s your “civic duty” to vote, like some abstract concept is more important than putting bread on your table or keeping your ailing grandparents in the home despite their “troubling behaviour.”
Take people who have just lost their homes. They have to scramble to find places to live. They probably have few financial resources – having sunk them into their property – and rightly wonder if this will permanently destroy their credit rating. And, in the midst of this personal crisis, they are told that they have to spend hours waiting in a line to vote, hours that they could be spending finding a way to care for their family?
We think there is a better way. That’s why we will challenge at the polls anybody who has recently lost their home, since, if you no longer have a permanent address, your identity cannot be verified, and if we cannot determine who you are, you should not be allowed to vote. When you think about it, it’s a matter of simple fairness, really. Frankly, you shouldn’t even bother turning up, because you will just be turned away.
It’s not voter suppression. It’s voter guilt-free time management assistance.
Another group we would like to help is students. Seriously, kids, don’t you have far more important things to worry about than voting? Finishing that psych paper so you don’t fail the course. Cramming for the medieval botany mid-term. Writing the perfect text message for that cute guy or gal that you’ve been crushing on since the beginning of term. With all of that going on, who could possibly have time to vote?
That’s why we’ll challenge any student living on campus. You say the address you were registered under is different from the one you currently live at because you no longer live at home? Sorry, but we can’t take the chance that you’re trying to vote illegally. Frankly, you shouldn’t even bother turning up, because you will just be turned away.
Think of it as a real world life management lesson.
Don’t think for a second that we’re focusing solely on the young and the homeless, though. We are concerned about the average person. That’s why, for example, in New Mexico’s February caucus, one in nine Democrats found their names were left off the voter rolls supplied by the State, including the elections supervisor of San Miguel County. Why Democrats? Because they tended to be poor and black, and we shouldn’t have to tell you that they have much more to worry about than spending a few minutes in a stuffy booth trying to figure out how to fill out arcane ballot forms!
Or, take Colorado, where the Republican Secretary of State deleted one in five names from the voters list. Can you imagine how much better their lives are going to be now that they have emptied their minds of petty politics and can concentrate on important things like where their next meal is coming from, or whether they should take two sleeping pills or the whole bottle? You certainly wouldn’t want to be distracted by a political campaign when you were contemplating those types of questions! We know this, and, unlike other political activists, we’re doing something about it.
Then, there were the 10 nuns in Indiana who lost their vote because their drivers’ licences had expired. Well, really! Nuns! You would think they would know better. In these troubled times, shouldn’t they be tending to the needs of their parishioners instead of exercising some lame kind of franchise? The fact that they were all over 80 was not lost on us, either; instead of wasting their time in a voting booth, they should have been making peace with their maker, because lord knows they probably aren’t long for this world!
There is no need to thank us for all that we are doing on your behalf. In fact, we’d prefer it if you didn’t mention this to anybody else. That’s just the kind of public-spirited people we are.