Hi Charlie. Excellent and nuanced look at this issue. I would add a couple of points: In Massachusetts if you enroll to vote in one town, you lose the right to vote in wherever else you live. So there’s that. However that caution would be destroyed by same day registration, which I never had an opinion about until I watched Wild, Wild Country, a documentary of the sannyism cult in Oregon, which flew massive amounts of homeless people into the community to register and vote on same day registration. THe cult took over the town. They also later poisoned the some of their enemies, so this was really off-the-charts evil and not your average voter issue, but still. As well as it worked out for you, and your good intentions, I think same-day registration opens the floodgates to voter fraud. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. It came out probably half dozen years ago and is quite powerful.
Such a thoughtful comment Jan, thank you! I have been meaning to watch Wild, Wild Country for a few years now (it's been recommended to me about a thousand times at this point), and I'll surely need to check it out after this.
I'm of two minds about same-day registration and similar kinds of voting reforms. On the one hand, it's important to prevent situations like you described, and you need to account for bad actors; on the other, as with any policy, you need to weigh the potential bad with the definite good. Maybe SDR opens the door to "Wild Wild Country" situations; but if you make all your laws to protect against these rare events (surely we can't blame the poisoning on same-day registration!), you might end up disenfranchising a lot of other people who really do deserve to be able to vote. I know I used myself as a counterexample in my post, but I actually do think it would have been unfair for me not to be able to vote in that election. Elections are decisions about the future as well as the best, and I certainly had a long future ahead of me in Boise!
It's similar to how I feel about laws designed to prevent more concrete versions of "voter fraud" in the traditional sense—as in, pretending to be someone else, or a deceased person, or outright lying about your address, all of which is already illegal, and none of which happens with much regularity in American elections. And so in this case, once you go down the road of prescribing lengths of time someone has to live somewhere before they're allowed to vote, it's hard to know where to stop.
It's all very tricky stuff, and difficult to find a perfect solution! Either way, I appreciate your comment—reading and writing as much as possible about this helps me to keep evolving where I stand on these questions. And thank you for subscribing :)
I was just sharing your substack with a friend of mine who said she wrote her masters thesis on Mary Oliver, but had to defend her heartily as she was “commerical.” Nothing more suspect than a successful poet. The arm of the Cape has always struck me as a little too remote for my tastes, but perhaps a revisit next time I’m nearby. Enjoyed your writing today!
Hi Charlie. Excellent and nuanced look at this issue. I would add a couple of points: In Massachusetts if you enroll to vote in one town, you lose the right to vote in wherever else you live. So there’s that. However that caution would be destroyed by same day registration, which I never had an opinion about until I watched Wild, Wild Country, a documentary of the sannyism cult in Oregon, which flew massive amounts of homeless people into the community to register and vote on same day registration. THe cult took over the town. They also later poisoned the some of their enemies, so this was really off-the-charts evil and not your average voter issue, but still. As well as it worked out for you, and your good intentions, I think same-day registration opens the floodgates to voter fraud. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. It came out probably half dozen years ago and is quite powerful.
Such a thoughtful comment Jan, thank you! I have been meaning to watch Wild, Wild Country for a few years now (it's been recommended to me about a thousand times at this point), and I'll surely need to check it out after this.
I'm of two minds about same-day registration and similar kinds of voting reforms. On the one hand, it's important to prevent situations like you described, and you need to account for bad actors; on the other, as with any policy, you need to weigh the potential bad with the definite good. Maybe SDR opens the door to "Wild Wild Country" situations; but if you make all your laws to protect against these rare events (surely we can't blame the poisoning on same-day registration!), you might end up disenfranchising a lot of other people who really do deserve to be able to vote. I know I used myself as a counterexample in my post, but I actually do think it would have been unfair for me not to be able to vote in that election. Elections are decisions about the future as well as the best, and I certainly had a long future ahead of me in Boise!
It's similar to how I feel about laws designed to prevent more concrete versions of "voter fraud" in the traditional sense—as in, pretending to be someone else, or a deceased person, or outright lying about your address, all of which is already illegal, and none of which happens with much regularity in American elections. And so in this case, once you go down the road of prescribing lengths of time someone has to live somewhere before they're allowed to vote, it's hard to know where to stop.
It's all very tricky stuff, and difficult to find a perfect solution! Either way, I appreciate your comment—reading and writing as much as possible about this helps me to keep evolving where I stand on these questions. And thank you for subscribing :)
I was just sharing your substack with a friend of mine who said she wrote her masters thesis on Mary Oliver, but had to defend her heartily as she was “commerical.” Nothing more suspect than a successful poet. The arm of the Cape has always struck me as a little too remote for my tastes, but perhaps a revisit next time I’m nearby. Enjoyed your writing today!
My sense is that in the world of poetry, “commercial” generally is code for “lots of people like to read them,” which is fine in my book!