Yes, I went there.

What we really need is a chicken slaughterhouse in every village.  If Herbert Hoover were alive today perhaps that would be his rallying cry to jolt complacent non-voters out of their stupor and out to the polls. 

We don't actually need to have these plants built but we really need to have funds appropriated and plans drawn up and announced.  Anything to get people incensed enough to get out and vote.  Perhaps then people would set aside the remote, delay updating their Facebook page for fifteen minutes, and actually attempt to take advantage of their hard fought right to vote.   

I wonder if the fact that voting is perceived as a right and not an obligation has anything to do with the poor turnout.  Perhaps voting should be repackaged and rebranded as an obligation.  Maybe then people would feel obligated to vote the way many of us feel obligated to politely listen to the people who knock on our doors handing out religious materials.  We'll listen to a stranger drone on about all that is wrong in the world and why we should follow them while at our front door, but we won't spens an equal amount of time to exercise our right to pick our political representatives.  

I was told recently that there are more than 7,000 registered voters in the village of Suffern and yet just 2,495 bothered to vote for mayor.  It gets worse, approximately 2,303 bothered to cast a vote for the Trustee candidates.

Switching to the race for Town Supervisor, 20,840 folks showed up to vote.  Now, Ramapo has approximately 110,000 residents and according to the last census (2000)  33.6% were under the age of 18.  Assuming that this is still the trend today, add in a little bit of simple math and we come up with approximately 73,040 people of voting age. 

Now of course there are those who for one reason or another cannot vote or have not found a way to register to vote.   Let's be kind here, I'm not saying that these people live under a rock or anything but with ACORN losing their funding, who knows, perhaps it's become a lot more difficult to register.   

The bottom line is that there must be at least 60,000-65,000 voters out there and yet just 20,840 decided to spend fifteen minutes of their time to vote.  Actually it was probably less than that on average because hey, it's not as if their neighbors were at the polls hogging the parking spaces and clogging up the lines to the voting machine now were they?

I would like to propose a new law.  All voters (the ones who actually do vote) must dip their index fingers into long lasting (365 days give or take) purple ink--same as they do in Iraq.  Going forward, these are the only people who are allowed to complain about the government we've got.  Everyone else?  Under my new law, they would be obligated to keep their piehole shut and refrain from complaining about how bad things are until the next election rolls around.  Of course they would only be free to complain if they voted in the next election. 

Things sure would be a lot quieter and quite possibly a lot more would be accomplished.

P.S. I wrote this post while eating chicken nuggets with Stubbs Texas Barbeque sauce.  A chicken slaughterhouse may really not be a bad idea--just don't put it in my backyard.