Letter to the Editor: Unprecedented housecleaning...

To the Editor:

I note that Ms. Miner is upset that many people are considering not voting in November’s election beause of the “quality” or lack thereof of the candidates presented. 

Several years ago Michael Reagan noted on his radio program that only about half of the eligible citizens register to vote, and of the half that registers only about half actually bother to vote.  In 2004, an election with a higher-than-usual turnout of voters, Bush minor and Kerry together could not muster the votes of half of the eligible citizens (about 104 million votes out of about 210 million eligible) and Mr. Bush’s winning total of 59-plus million votes as a bit more than one-fourth of the eligible citizens. In 1996, Mr. Clinton’s “mandate from the people” consisted of about 15 percent of eligible citizens.

I suspect that if “none of these candidates” was an option on the ballot a lot more people would go to the voting booths and there’d be a political housecleaning unprecedented in American history. Many people have told me they don’t vote for anybody, they vote against. The basic problem with the election system is that one cannot vote against a candidate without voting for the candidate’s opponent.

Opponents of the “none of the above” option point out that one can write in anybody and vote for them. That’s true. It’s also true that write-in votes don’t have to be counted – and the Supreme Court of the United States says that’s just fine with them (in 1992 in Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U.S. 428, the Supreme Court held that “Hawaii’s prohibition on write-in voting does not unreasonably infringe upon its citizens’ rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments”). Logic and critical thinking are not requirements within the American legal system.

With regard to this year’s candidates, H.L. Mencken was right a century ago when he commented that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

Bob Ackley

Emerson