Suffrage for the Dead

Suffrage has seen a lot of action over the past century or so, based on a very vague Constitution regarding voting policy. It used to refer to white, Christian, male land-owners - and slowly but surely it has spread to all walks of life, all races, and all genders. But there's one place still unspecified that is being debated on and may cause suffrage to rear its head again.

The Constitution doesn't say a voter has to be alive. And in West Virginia, they're taking away the dead's right to vote.


The Secretary of State in West Virginia, Republican Betty Ireland, has been purging more than 6,000 names from the voting polls since she started her first term. And those 6,000 names are all people who are dead. And odds are that the rumors are true, and they're mostly dead Democrats.

So why is this happening? Since when are we stopping the right of the dead to vote in elections? Haven't they more or less BEEN doing so in elections past - and we didn't seem to have too huge of a problem with it back then. Heck, back in 2002, some politician in South Dakota added like 2,000 names of deceased Native Americans to the voting poll - almost a form of honoring the dead, right?

Frankly, in a society like the one we have today with its political correctness gestapo and levels of idiocy enough to permit people like John Edwards to continue "communicating with the dead", why shouldn't dead people have the right to vote? If we're going to foolishly believe as a society that so many idiots (oh, I mean "psychics") can actually communicate with the dead, shouldn't those political views communicated by the dead be honored and respected as a vote cast in their name? As the PC-police would say, we should be tolerant of the views of all people, even the dead. And if great-grandpappy wants you to cast his vote for "the man what ain't a Jew" - who are we to deny him his right to have that opinion and have it count in the polls?

And if we stop there, with eliminating the right for the dead to vote, what will we do about the UNdead? Should the living-dead zombies and vampires be left out of elections just because of their status as living-impaired? And if they can't vote, even though they're dead but MOBILE, what happens to the living, yet immobile? Should coma patients not be allowed to vote?

Does a lack of brain activity mean that you shouldn't be allowed to vote?

Insert your own joke about George W. Bush here. I don't feel like making it, but you have every right to do so if you wish.

The point is, voting is never an easy subject. Frankly, I agree with the author of this article I picked the story up from: "I also want the [state's voting polls] purged of felons, illegal aliens and people who have moved to some other state."

Because frankly, if we can't even manage to do that, what's the harm in leaving some dead people on the polls on top of that?




http://donsurber.blogspot.com/2006/06/dead-lose-their-right-to-vote-in-west.html