The United States of Old People Running the Show

When the Puritans landed in America and began to colonize New England, they started a government that is relatively simple. They have town meetings on which they would decide on important political and economic matters. This was a primitive form of direct democracy and although it was very simple in nature and things would easily get passed or denied, it had a lot of flaws. One of the flaws is which everyone could see who voted on what and who did not vote. Another is that you have to be a member of the church in order to participate or even live in their society. I will explain on how these two flaws are tied into this post later in this posting. Keep in mind that this is one of many threats to our humble democracy.

According to that post written by Project Vote, an anonymous blogger on the blog site http://mydd.com/, he and I'm going on a limb to assume that he is a he, discusses how Republicans in New Hampshire are trying to put through a bill that will limit the voter turnout rate for young people. One of the bills, HB 176, will only allow students to vote in their college towns if their parents had previously established a permanent residency there. The other is to eliminate voting day registration which help to increase voter turnout rate which fuels our humble democracy. This means in order to students to vote they have to register to vote earlier and either go to colleges that are next to home or have their parents move to the student's college town with the student. Let's face it, students want to try to pick a far away college that they like to get away from their parents and some parents understand that and would welcome it. These parents are not going to simply drop everything and move to a college town in order for their kids to vote because of a ridiculous law. I know what you are going to say next, "Well these parents are hurting our democracy because they aren't allowing their kids to vote". You will probably say something close to that nature and my response to you is that, it is not the fault of the parents, blame it on the Republicans that came up with such a ridiculous law.

This is related to the many flaws of the Puritans system of government. By only allowing church members to participate, they limit the government with only a certain group. Given that back then, there were mostly Puritans living in that area, but there were other groups as well. The other groups were barred from participating the government and even caste out because they did not follow the Puritans' religious ideas. What is even more depressing is that men were only allow to participate thus further enable men to hold more power. Therefore power is held by a group of men and since everyone can see each other vote, when an opposition arises, the opponents are either coerced into the powerful circle of men or crushed. This is what exactly Republicans are trying to do. Since there are already limits on the voters, they want to expand the limits so that essentially this country will be ruled by powerful men of the circle. Since our young population can't be kicked out or crushed yet, placing more restrictive measures will be their key to power. The ones that are left to vote will be a closed group and therefore any resistance can be dealt with through coercion or other means.

One of the reason that the Republicans are trying to push this through is because they claim that "young people are foolish, lack life experience, vote on their feelings, and vote as liberals". I'll show them a lack of life experience; furthermore, I can say the same thing to many adults and we see this everyday. I absolutely agree with the author in that this is really just a scheme for politicians to hold power. Older people tend to hold on to their ideologies and when young people come around, they tend to "skew" the trend. They are using reasons such as widespread vote fraud in order to get the bills to pass, however there is absolutely no evidence to support voter fraud and once again we're back to the power grab. The author explains that the real problem is that only 71% of eligible votes are registered to vote and politicians fear that if more people are allowed to vote, this will disenfranchise them. By limiting voter turnout this will only hurt our humble democracy and make a pathway to allow a certain group of powerful people to rule.