Chris Graham: We’ve got how we vote all wrong

Some of us pretend that we vote “on the issues,” some make a big deal about looking at the candidates’ records.

Almost all of us just vote for the person wearing the colors of our favorite team.

We’ve all got it all wrong.

Voting shouldn’t be something marketed to us by Madison Avenue types, trying to get us to buy their version of mom, baseball and apple pie, or whatever.

The candidates’ records part: I mean, sure, we shouldn’t be electing moral reprobates, because elections are about hiring people for jobs, so we should vet the people we’re thinking about hiring.

Voting “on the issues” is just plain silly: because literally nobody who claims to look at the issues, and then decide who is better on the issue, is outright lying, to you and themselves.

We shouldn’t wait for the candidates to articulate “the issues” to us; we already know what they are.

If a party decides to nominate a criminal to carry its banner, that should be automatically disqualifying, but I am only aware of one such candidate being on a ballot anytime in my lifetime, and to be blunt, most of the time, the parties have enough sense not to do that.

Screw the marketers. We can make it so that the money spent on ads is money wasted.

Here’s how: we define what the issues are, and we demand that the candidates tell us how they’re going to fix things.

Here’s where, as the writer, I’ll get political – my issues at the national level are, affordable healthcare for all, #1, then national security, K-12 education, and jobs.

You reading this, you no doubt have your own priorities.

I’ll advocate for healthcare at #1 because, healthcare is what keeps us alive.

National security has to be a top-level priority for any nation.

Education makes us better citizens, and prepares us to be able to participate fully as economic actors.

Jobs – more of them, better quality – help us all live our fullest lives, individually and collectively.

I’ll be voting on those priorities in the national elections.

Locally, I live in Waynesboro, which has City Council elections in November.

My priorities there: housing, K-12 education and jobs.

Allow me to carry over my arguments from above about K-12 education and jobs being priorities.

With housing, Waynesboro, like many cities in America, needs to figure out how it can incentivize affordable housing, so that people trying to work themselves into better situations don’t have to fight the intense rent inflation that we’ve seen since the pandemic.

That’s a longer-term kind of thing. In the short term, we have people working full-time jobs who can’t afford to live here now, and are forced to find a room with family and friends, if they have people locally that can help them out.

Better-paying jobs will help out there.

Putting more into our K-12 education system will help recruit companies who need a better-educated workforce to be able to set up shop here.

It all goes together.

But only if we make it all go together.

Most of us complain that neither of the parties really represents us, does for us what we need done.

I’d argue that’s because we approach voting passively. We let them tell us what they’re going to do, and then we decide, often between the lesser of two evils.

We can flip the way we do things on its head if we start making it so that we tell them what we want them to do, and pick the side that promises to give us more, then hold them accountable next time around.

What do you want out of our government?

I hope, for your sake, it’s more than simply, beating the other guys.

There’s got to be more to life than that big floating scoreboard in the sky.