Voting, process over substance, privacy and civic duty
Fred Clark over at Slacktivist has been on a roll the past few days, posting a series of excellent articles on the topic
of voting, getting out the vote, the conflict between privacy and civic duty and
the insane focus on process rather than substance of much of the press.
In his first post, Fred talks about his experiences going door to door in his district to get out the vote and how people seem overwhelmingly dismissive of Bush.
He then wrote two posts about secritve ballots. In the first he tries to tease out why so many people are so private about whom they are
voting for. In the second he talks about why it is in fact important to discuss who you are going to vote for and why.
In between, Fred takes a swipe at the press for focussing so much on the process in political stories (who is doing what to whom?) rather than the substance of the conflicts.
An amazing set of posts y’all should read; if you haven’t been reading Slacktivist every day, you are missing out. This is stuff that stands above “mere politics”, this is the lifeblood of democracy itself.