I’ve always felt that voting should come with a cost. That cost is a little effort on the part of citizens to a) learn about candidates and issues and b) get their rear ends to the Board of Elections to register, and c) get said rear end to their polling place on election day during a prescribed set of hours.
That’s the way we used to do it, and any corrupt local political machine really had to work to rig an election under those restrictions. But it’s a lot easier nowadays with motor voter, library registrations, street festival registration, fear of photo IDs, lots of questionable people signing up voters on street corners, and no-excuse absentee balloting that goes for weeks. All of this enables what I call cheap participation. The day will come when we rue the day we bought into all this nonsense.
That said, no-excuse absentee balloting began yesterday. It runs until Nov. 4.
