I voted by absentee this year, so I was able to canvass for a little this afternoon before turning into Chauffeur Dad. I’m waiting at a large warehouse-turned-kid-exercise-palace, with a gymnastics place on one side and my son’s taekwondo place on the other. I was sitting on the floor when I heard a fellow parent, or maybe a gymnastics coach, pontificating to several poor desk personnel about how we should reinstitute some sort of literacy test for voting. I heard him misstate the positions of one of the candidates for a few minutes, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer. I stood up and walked over.<\/p>\n
So I heard you wanted to reinstitute literacy tests for voting?<\/p>\n
Uh, maybe not anything like a college degree but I think people need to …<\/p>\n
Okay, so I have to ask: what’s your favorite Federalist Paper?<\/p>\n
Uh..?<\/p>\n
What’s your favorite Federalist Paper?<\/p>\n
Um, well, I’m not sure I mean that, but I think people need to know something–<\/p>\n
Okay, fine enough. What’s your favorite section of the Florida Constitution?<\/p>\n
Look, I’m more of a statutory guy. There’s a difference between knowing about platforms and knowing about the constitution.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Right. So then I asked him about some relevant legislative positions of the candidate he was fulminating against. Not that accurately, either. Fair? No. But I wanted him to think that maybe, just maybe, disfranchisement mechanisms affect more than just the targets of your hatred. Occasionally, maybe once every few years on average, I have to use<\/i> my knowledge in public. I consider it an occupational hazard. <\/p>\n
And to answer the obvious question, at the moment my favorites are Federalist No. 10<\/a> and Florida’s Article I, Section 1<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I voted by absentee this year, so I was able to canvass for a little this afternoon before turning into Chauffeur Dad. I’m waiting at a large warehouse-turned-kid-exercise-palace, with a gymnastics place on one side and my son’s taekwondo place on the other. I was sitting on the floor when I heard a fellow parent, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-nB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}