If jury service is mandatory, why not voting?The letter's writer, Al Meyerhoff, continues to suggest email voting or weekend elections to make getting to the poles easier.
There was a time in recent history that I made getting out the vote my own personal mission. I'd hassle the clerks at my grocery store, make sure my friends were registered, etc.
Then I read The Left Hand of God by Michael Lerner. When he's not editing or writing for Tikkun Magazine or acting as rabbi for a San Francisco synagogue, Lerner is involved with a research facility that he co-founded - I can't get my hands on the name of it right now - where he studies, among other things, the voting habits of "average America."
What he found was that a huge chunk of people he spoke with who voted Republican did so because they felt the GOP addressed their spiritual needs and Democrats did not - which I guess is pretty undeniable since so many of us Democrats are terrified of the slippery slope of church and state separation - that is, if we talk about spirituality, we're throwing ourselves down the slope.
As a follow-up in his research, Lerner told participants about the Republican party line beyond the God factor and found that a big chunk of those spirituality voters had previously known nothing about the rest of their platform and often disagreed with much of it.
All of which makes me second guess my "vote or die" mentality. Is an uneducated voter really better than a non-voter?
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