vote

N O V E M B E R 2

November 2 was election day in 2004. The shirt I'm wearing in this photo (actually an iron-on) was part of a grass-roots, non-partisan, get-out-the-vote campaign, and the agency was none other than wee, scrappy Wieden+Kennedy 12. (Which is a school. Well. An agency disguised as a school. OK, an experiment disguised as an agency, disguised as a school.) I wear the shirt every election day, local or national, because I believe that people, speaking together, as one voice, can make big change.

Kind of like what happened yesterday.

Also yesterday, debate raged about whether it's okay to tell undecided/uninformed voters how to vote on local measures on the day of the election, the idea being you're helping them by introducing them to the political process.

N O P E

If you don't have opinions about issues on the ballot, and if you take someone else's suggestions without researching them, you are essentially letting that person vote for you, which is not the same as voting. It's a lazy, complacent simulation of voting. Voting is harder than that. Voting SHOULD be harder than that. Voting should take time & research & discussion, because you'd be surprised at how vastly your opinion might differ from people you know very well. And there's no real shortcut to finding that out other than research and discussion.



M E A N W H I L E

Telling someone else how to vote without references or citations is arrogant, condescending, and self-serving. Nobody has the authority to tell someone else how to vote, without discussion or debate, on the day of the election. No body. Doing so is not helpful to anyone but yourself -- you're making your vote count more times than you are allowed. To recap: You are allowed one vote.

In the olden days, if you got other people to vote the way you wanted them to, you had to pay them, and it was called "vote buying," and it was illegal. And it was not a true reflection of the will of the people. Which is

the entire

point

of voting.

T H E R E F O R E

If you're thinking of voting: Read. Debate. Listen. Think. Debate some more. Then go to the polls. Draw the curtains. And vote. But really vote, yeah? Don't vote blindly or vote the way someone told you to vote. Because voting with ignorance, apathy, & sloth is far more dangerous than not-voting with ignorance, apathy, & sloth.

If you're thinking of telling impressionable, undecided, lazy people how to vote: Don't. Just ... don't.