The Men Who Stare at Votes

From our Movie-Titles-With-Meaning series.

We wanted to do a post with a title that plays on the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats since 2009.

Goats - Votes, there is much more than phonetics at work here, hollered the K-Landnews TheEditor. Don't you see the obvious similarities between a bunch of billy goats kicking, punching and pissing on their face and any modern day electoral campaign?, it** continued while it reached for a glass of yellowish liquid on its desk. Oh. you frigging morons, it said as it noticed our looks, that is stale Mountain Dew from earlier today. Waste not, want not.

The reason why we did not dare to go ahead with the post is, you guessed it, George Clooney. Reading this post about politicians and pollsters without having the image of George Clooney somewhere between the lines is impossible.

How could it not be?

Did we just compare old and new British PM David Cameron to George Clooney? No, no, and no.

But see, that's the kind of trouble you create when you want to use a funny movie title.

Modern election campaigns have many of the elements of the goats movie, campaigns try to hypnotize you into selecting their brand, they use more trigger words than the Manchurian Candidate, they are MK-ULTRA minus the acid, a drum circle at midnight without the cute dancers.

Worst of all, once the polling stations close, the non voting population gets a few mentions and a few standard articles with the same worn out pretend worries about democracy, and then they are forgotten until the next election cycle.

Some countries have mandatory voting and get decent participation, most don't care, and participation seems to decrease pretty much across the board.

We have a simple, workable solution which resolves the problem of billion dollar campaign spending at the same time.

Every voter gets enrolled in a lottery funded by a measly 1% of the campaign money, apportioned in chunks of a million dollars, or Euros. One percent of the projected US 2016 presidential election spending of 10 billion creates a small town full of new millionaires!

The 50% or more of the population who do not vote because "it doesn't change anything anyway" would have to think twice about this argument.

We know it is far fetched. Having seen how voter rolls get cleaned out when there is no give-away for voters makes it much more likely that such a lottery would be accompanied by an even greater effort to keep the undeserving from voting.

The most thrilling experiment in democracy would be to make the job as head of state part of the lottery winnings, say, first prize. Taking the ego out of running for head of state might be nice, but more importantly, as history has shown over and over, anybody can run a country if their support staff is minimally competent.

** TheEditor insists on a gender neutral form of address.