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Taylor Swift: Voter Registration Spike Follows Star’s Political Awakening
- Thread starter phands
- Start date
Well, you should care. If you recall, kings and queens and emperors often valued the sage advice given by the court jesters who entertained them.
We should ask TSwizzle.
Question for TSwizzle. How does it make you feel to see Mike Huckabee say that Taylor Swift's influence is nil regarding the mid-terms because the only people who listen to her are 13 year olds who can't vote?
TSwizzle
I am unburdened by what has been.
They are going to regret that when the jury duty summons comes through 
ronburgundy
Contributor
There is nothing wrong with celebrities trying to inform the public or persuade them to engage in more moral actions, which can include voting a particular way. On average they are likely as least as informed and ethical and the average person and the average
politician or pundit who dominate political discourse (admittedly a low bar).
However, there is a problem with efforts to simply increase the number of voters by pushing voting in and of itself. Society is just as likely to be harmed as helped by more people voting. In fact, in general the likelihood of harm is greater if the only reason people are voting at all is because someone told them to without also encouraging rational thinking and/or application of defensible ethics.
It is nauseating to see those "get out the vote" campaigns that tell people it doesn't matter how they vote, "just vote".
And I wouldn't trust Swift fans farther than I can throw them to make informed and reasoned choices on any remotely complex issue.
OTOH, with our current party system, simply defaulting to voting to give more power to the Democrats and less to the GOP is both the clear moral and on-average far more rational choice to advance the personal and ethical interests of most of her fans and most people on the planet.
Thus, as long as they are told to vote Democrat that will have a positive effect, and maybe needed to counter the more stupidly destructive message of many on the left of "Don't vote, because the Dems are just as bad." That message got us SCOTUS that will dismantle reproductive rights, gay rights, secular government, etc., for the next 30 years. A consequence of "not voting" by many on the left that they were informed was a certainty if Hillary did not get sufficient votes to beat Trump.
politician or pundit who dominate political discourse (admittedly a low bar).
However, there is a problem with efforts to simply increase the number of voters by pushing voting in and of itself. Society is just as likely to be harmed as helped by more people voting. In fact, in general the likelihood of harm is greater if the only reason people are voting at all is because someone told them to without also encouraging rational thinking and/or application of defensible ethics.
It is nauseating to see those "get out the vote" campaigns that tell people it doesn't matter how they vote, "just vote".
And I wouldn't trust Swift fans farther than I can throw them to make informed and reasoned choices on any remotely complex issue.
OTOH, with our current party system, simply defaulting to voting to give more power to the Democrats and less to the GOP is both the clear moral and on-average far more rational choice to advance the personal and ethical interests of most of her fans and most people on the planet.
Thus, as long as they are told to vote Democrat that will have a positive effect, and maybe needed to counter the more stupidly destructive message of many on the left of "Don't vote, because the Dems are just as bad." That message got us SCOTUS that will dismantle reproductive rights, gay rights, secular government, etc., for the next 30 years. A consequence of "not voting" by many on the left that they were informed was a certainty if Hillary did not get sufficient votes to beat Trump.
To some extent we need to have voter registration. The thing is the right to vote isn't enough, to vote the government needs to know who and what you can vote for and since there is no general obligation to tell the government where you live it has no way to know this. I recently had to do an in-person request for an absentee ballot and that gave me a behind-the-scenes peek from listening to the employees talk. They had to take my address and figure out what precinct I would be voting in and then go get an appropriate ballot for that precinct. There were IIRC 4 (the ballot isn't in front of me) offices on that ballot in this election that are address dependent and probably a couple more that I didn't even see as I live outside the city proper--no city offices will appear on my ballot.
There are some things we could do, however:
1) We already have motor-voter laws in many places in an attempt to address this but I think they go too far--they make it trivially easy to register to vote without checking if you are a citizen. Now, a native speaker isn't going to have a problem understanding but those with limited English could easily be confused.
2) The reality is that most people do have to tell the government where they live because of driver's licenses.
2a) Rather than motor-voter, I would like to see voter registration automatically updated when you change the address on your driver's license, or replace it with one from a new state (they have the old one, they know what registration to cancel.)
2b) I would like to see the polls required to accept anything that would be adequate to get a non-driver's ID plus something establishing citizenship as adequate for voting. (I think this would be a minor issue, though--the problem is people who don't have ID in the first place, not people with ID but no voter registration.)