I have a friend with whom I went to school who is now a professor at Yale.  Every one of his Facebook posts is about race identity politics.  Its sad and gross navel gazing, but it illustrates the academy in steep and rapid decline.  His latest lie was from the New York Times on why Voter ID Laws were racist tactics deployed by Republicans to hurt minorities.  The article concluded: 'The next time voter ID laws reach the justices, they should see them for the anti-democratic sham they are.'

Okay, we can stop chuckling at the childish ignorance of race-baiting stupidity.  Time to get serious.

What's truly an anti-democratic sham is making the electoral franchise passive, indeed, nearly as subliminal as somnolence itself.  What's next?  Intravenous voting?  Voting under anesthesia, a brainless exercise, you wake up with a stylus in your arm and they hand you a little juice box with a straw to help get you back on your feet?

A democratic republic should not be a passive exercise, but rather an active one, one that emphasizes not rights but instead responsibilities.  Therefore voting shouldn't be made easier but rather harder, with more obstacles, perhaps getting rid of the absentee by-mail system entirely and bringing it back to its true civic nature; standing in lines, waiting your turn, making it uncomfortable, presenting documents of not only your visual identity but perhaps a live scan.  Hell, I can't even go on a field trip with my kids at school without getting a live scan.

Let's not romanticize voting by making a mockery of the franchise, and neither let us infantilize it by treating us as incapables.  The Republic was founded not on anemia but strength.  We should all identify with the pain and suffering which produced it, making voting therefore a deliberate process, not by equating it with the ease of exhaling or passing gas.

No.  This trend is directionally perverse, dishonest and microwaveable.  It's fast-food democracy and it's appalling.  

I'd rather weed out those who show no interest.  Why romanticize the franchise when we already place limitations upon it by not allowing felons to vote?

Show us you care enough about democracy to be bothered, just a little by it, yes, even (God forbid) inconvenienced by interrupting your busy day of Facebooking for just a quick sec.

Perhaps a half mile of broken glass embedded in tar, or a modest moat of it, around each polling station.  It's your job to surpass it.  Or make it fun!  A Mud Run!  At least it would show you were fine with getting a little dirty for your Republic, sweating a little, maybe a small bruise or a drop of blood, showing your solidarity with those who also bled to give it to you.

If you can't be inconvenienced by it, perhaps you aren't worthy of participating in the active democracy we are all called to serve, not be served, nor pandered to as political bowling pins in some deliberate attempt at misdirection on a wedge issue Strawman, just waiting to be lined up and knocked back down.

Trust me, as someone who has been disenfranchised in a blue state, I understand the other side very well of being sidelined as an unusual relic of the past in today's trendy world of American Idol politics.  Perhaps, someday, when my kids are my age, Ryan Seacrest will have everyone text in their vote, but by that time the Electoral College will have been discarded and we will have real time winner-take-all percentages as New York and Los Angeles run the entire country into the ground.