The Bee Doesn't Take Voting Seriously

Whatever one might think of Caitlyn Jenner's decision to enter California's gubernatorial recall election, it would be a struggle to find a more ridiculous reason to complain than the one below, offered by the Sacramento Bee (alternate link):

Obligatory photo of Wheaties. (Image by Famartin, via Wikimedia, license.)

For starters, she has shown little interest in one of the most basic duties of democracy -- voting.

Politico's Carla Marinucci broke a story this past week about how Jenner sat out two-thirds of the elections she could have voted in since 2000.

When Newsom won the governor's seat by a landslide in 2018, Jenner did not bother to vote. Nor did she take part in the 2003 recall election of then-Gov. Gray Davis and the man who replaced him, Arnold Schwarzenegger. [links omitted, format edits, my emphasis]

First, the United States is a republic, not a democracy. Second, voting is not a duty: It is a civil right. Third, it's very easy to find elsewhere a logical reason for the Republican not to have voted very often, and in Jenner's own words no less:

"For the past decade we have seen the glimmer of the Golden State reduced by one-party rule that places politics over progress and special interests over people," Jenner, 71, said in a statement. "I am a proven winner and the only outsider who can put an end to Gavin Newsom's disastrous time as governor."

Were Jenner a Democrat running in a heavily-Republican state, I am sure the same outlets now sputtering in cognitive dissonance that Jenner is running as (gasp!) a Republican, would have had our ears ringing with the term disenfranchised by now.

The fact is, even the news media tacitly admit -- when they comment on the level of turnout for any given election -- that not showing up to vote can be a strong sign of disenchantment with the choices on offer -- a form of protest. Indeed, absent a sustantive choice at the ballot box, it can be the only way some voters can have a voice in an election at all. (This is exactly why dictatorships with show-elections force everyone to vote.)

I myself have refused to vote numerous times, most recently in 2016, when I declined to vote for President.

It should hardly surprise that the left-wing media establishment would display such ignorance of the nature of our government and how the governed can express displeasure through a boycott of the ballot box: Many within are the same people who want to make it fraudulently easy to vote, encourage everyone to do so whether they are responsible or not, and lower the voting age below legal adulthood.

Voting is a serious matter requiring mature judgement: Calling it a "duty" and showing disdain for all manner of responsibility by anyone who might choose to vote are two sides of the same anti-republican, anti-American coin.

-- CAV