Signed, sealed, delivered

I just filled out my absentee ballot. It's not a pre-paid envelope. I'm too unmotivated to find my local polling station, yet they expect me to go to the post office and buy a stamp? In these days of online bill-paying and email I can't remember the last time I bought stamps. I am the anti-Luddite.

From a short story by Dave Eggers, and really the best idea I've heard in a long time:

"...and then we did some work on elections. First we made them no more than two months long, publicly funded, and forced the networks to give two hours a night to the campaigns. To really cover the issues, you know? Not the horserace aspect, not the issues of politics, but the issues of governing! There's a difference, but you wouldn't have known it way back when.

So we fixed that, and then we perfected online and phone voting. Man, participation went through the roof once we did that. Everyone thought there was just all this apathy, when the main problem was finding your damned polling place! And all the red tape—register now, vote then, come to this elementary school, but skip work to do it, on and on. Voting on a Tuesday? Jesus damned Christ! We gave people a week, let them do it so many ways, and all that—the online voting, the voting over the phone—man that was great, suddenly participation exploded, from about, what, 40 percent, to 88. We did that over Columbus Day weekend, I think. I remember I'd just had my hair cut very short. We called that style the Timberlake."