Notes on the coming election

First of all, if you don’t vote on Tues., Nov. 2nd, you are part of the problem. We are, after all, a democracy, and power derives from a mandate that is given by the voters of the country. If every voter does not exercise the right to cast a ballot, a fundamental right on which our country is based is endangered. Voter apathy also makes it easier for the unscrupulous to take power and to keep it. So, do your part and vote.

That said, is there anything that can be done to increase voter turnout on Election Day? How about this? We make sure that all voters are enfranchised.

Take primary elections, for instance. Primary elections are held for one purpose; to allow the Democrats and Republicans to set their slate of candidates for the General Election. To vote in the primary in Kentucky, though, you must be registered as a member of one of these two parties.

So who pays the tab for the primaries? Kentucky’s taxpayers, that’s who. Even those voters registered as Independent contribute, even though they aren’t invited to the party.

What did our Forebears think of this? Does the phrase “Taxation without Representation” ring a bell? When the colonists were expected to pay taxes to the Crown, but denied the right to vote, they revolted, and a new country was born.

This country was going to be one where the rights of everyone were respected. It took some time but we are closer to that ideal today than perhaps we’ve ever been. But when a situation exists where the citizens of our state are expected to declare allegiance to a political party in order to vote-and neither Democrats nor Republicans are mentioned in either the state or federal Constitutions-then we have lost our way, big time!

When primary elections are closed, the number of voters the candidate needs to reach is limited, usually to what is referred as the party’s base. For the Republicans, those voters tend to be conservative; for the Democrats, liberal. That means that the views of the candidate must match the viewpoints of the party’s base.

And that means gridlock, in Frankfort and in Washington. In Frankfort, how many times over the last ten years or so has the State Assembly failed to pass a budget because the Republican-led Senate could not agree with the Democrat-led House? More times than you might imagine, much like the quagmire in D. C., where the “loyal opposition” has made it plain that ensuring Obama is a one-term President is more important than in working with the majority party to formulate any policies that will benefit the country as a whole.

In addition to allowing early voting, I would like to see laws enacted in Kentucky that strip away the two major party’s right to require voters to declare allegiance to either of them. No voter should have to disclose any more than their name, rank, and serial number. Let the voter declare to the precinct officials what party’s primary they wish to vote in. Then let the candidates deliver their message to all voters in the primary. The result should be candidates who more closely mirror, not their party’s extremes, but the average Kentuckian, a win-win situation for everyone.