shanen's Journal: My ballot is in the mail? Like the check? Riiiight!

American and like freedom? Please vote ASAP!

You don't like freedom? Then why bother voting just because you were ordered to vote? You don't really care.

Before the personal sob story, two higher-level comments. One about freedom and one about demographics.

Freedom is like TANSTAAFL. The payment consumes time and effort. If you actually want to be free, then you have to work at it. You have to collect data and figure out what it means so that your choices can be free. I think I love freedom, so I do the work.

The demographic research indicates about one third of the people (in every country) hate the idea of working for freedom. They are the wannabe followers of various kinds of authoritarian leaders and they just want to be told what to think and what to do. Makes their lives simpler and it doesn't really matter who they are following. (Usually they are scattered all over the place, but TFG's closest approach to a "political skill" is in getting lots of them into one angry mob.)

The rest of the people say they like freedom, but they are actually spread over a spectrum of how much work they want to do for freedom. I'm near one extreme, and at the other end you have people who don't actually want to do any work for their freedoms. Too bad that makes them easy to manipulate, especially in these days of computerized micro-targeting of ads and propaganda. At that end of the spectrum, they won't even think about which of their own personal buttons were pushed. (This means the Dark Money Boys can just buy as many votes as they need--which is why so many elections between vastly different candidates have become so close. The DMBs are greedy and don't like to waste money, so they don't buy excess votes.)

Now for the sob story.

I've voted by mail for most of my life. This year I requested my ballot as usual and was notified it would be sent at the proper time, which is now past. But no ballot has arrived.

I checked my voter registration at that time, and it looked fine. Same as it ever was. But now? Nothing. My voter registration suddenly went away.

There are actually several online systems that are supposed to help with voting. The voter registration system continues to insist I don't exist, but there are separate websites for tracking my ballot. But they also insist "Nothing to see here."

I contacted my registrar and was assured my ballot was in the mail--but at no point did the registrar include any information to indicate the status of my ballot had actually been checked. My theory is the registrar is just saying that to ALL of the voters who ask. Too busy (because of deliberate staffing shortages) to do any actual checking.

If I trust what someone in a different office said on the phone, then I might know one of the errors in play. Based on that data, my theory is that there was a bunch of registration data input by temps. Perhaps even by volunteers. But the instructions were something like "Speed is most important here." They probably gave prizes and bonuses for the fastest work. "Don't worry about accuracy. Our big computer will fix any mistakes." Meanwhile the programming of the "big computer" focused on finding EVERY error or inconsistency so those ballots could be frozen, with the highest detection priority of course given to the ballots of "bad" voters like yours truly. "Sterilize imperfections?" After the election, who cares why someone didn't get to vote?

All of this reminded me of why I voted AGAINST the incumbent whenever the candidates were similar enough. (These years the candidates have become so dissimilar that I'd forgotten about that old tiebreaker.) Unfortunately, the only thing all of the politicians were able to agree on was that they were personally "entitled" to job security, so killing democracy to protect their own "jobs" made perfect sense to them.

"Public service". No. It's just a "job". And now you suddenly understand how Congress can have incredibly low approval ratings while almost all of them get reelected every time. That was the only objective all of the bastards could agree on. (Not all of them are selfish bastards, but the the "principled public servant" caucus doesn't have enough votes to sneeze at.)

So if you are a freedom-loving American, I urge to vote. In memory of my dead ballot. Perhaps for the last time it actually matters? The very idea of democracy in America has been dancing on the cliff's edge for so long, maybe we didn't notice when it fell off? Maybe it's just been falling quietly and will hit the rocks RSN.

Ending with a joke? My quasi-mathematical definition of freedom: #1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} <> (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)