Voting, Jury Service are Not Actually Civic "Duties"
By David "the Jaguar" Lydon
Opinions Writer

One of the problems associated with communication is that there’s this lag between the time when one person sends and the other person receives said communication. Much energy has been wasted bemoaning the difficulty this poses for verbal communication, where the lag between speaking and hearing can be up to several thousandths of a second, but few people talk about the problems it poses for TSL. Or maybe they do talk, but I haven’t heard them yet. Either way, the lag between this week’s rock-solid TSL opinions deadline and Friday’s distribution of the paper is such that a major event—Election Day—will be caught in the middle. So here I am, on one side of that gap, talking to you, who are on the other. Greetings, people of the future! I am David, and I come in peace!

This gap winds up being less important than one might think, however. After all, all of us residents of the past know who’s going to be the next governor of California—an incompetent jerk. The previous sentence may have sounded like nothing more than a lame joke, but it was actually a clever segue into an important point: namely, I’m super-psyched that I’m not voting in California this year. Admittedly, that phychedness is tempered somewhat in that I’ll instead be voting in Connecticut, where I feel that the most interesting race that hasn’t been considered a lock for weeks is the race to see which three of the five possible candidates will get to sit on the City of Stamford’s Board of Education. I had very strong views on this issue back when I was in high school, and it made me feel pretty good to vote against the horribly incompetent board members (as opposed to the relatively incompetent ones—you can’t expect too much quality in a time-consuming job that you’re not really compensated for).

Speaking of the compensation-quality debate, I was told at lunch today that if you don’t vote, you have no real right to complain, and that if you try to avoid jury duty, you can’t complain about the O.J. Simpson verdict. I heartily disagree with both these notions. I mean, I’m an American, and the Founding Fathers fought a revolution against the British (and the Germans, too, as I recall) so that people could have forever the right to complain about the O.J. verdict without government interference. But on a less-crazy level, the logic of not complaining still sucks. I haven’t yet been called for jury duty, but if it happens next summer, I can tell you what will happen: I’ll spend six or seven hours lounging around the courthouse, only to be questioned by the lawyers involved in the case who won’t want me on their jury because I’m a college student. It may be difficult, but if you ever find an honest lawyer, they’ll tell you that lawyers never want college students to serve on juries. For me, this will represent six or seven hours of my life wasted; for the lawyers, a few billable minutes spent questioning me; and for the American justice system, some minor wear and tear on a chair in the courthouse lounge and several minutes of some clerk’s time. And somehow I’m a bad person if I want to avoid this arrangement?

Similarly, why should annoyance at the government require voting? In the race for Connecticut’s comptroller, I voted for someone from the Libertarian party. You may argue that I “threw my vote away,” but seeing as we’re talking about the comptroller, I would argue that it’s impossible to do anything but throw your vote away. Should I still have the right to complain if the comptroller comptrols improperly? Of course! After all, using the logic that only voters can complain, people who vote for the loser should have no right to complain either—they chose a side, that side lost, get over it. In truth, we all expect a certain level of competency from all the candidates offered for elected positions, and when officials do something we strongly disagree with, we have the right to complain about it—we’re their constituents whether we voted for them or not, and our views matter.

Which brings me to my final point: I don’t see voting as a civic obligation or anything like that. I find it unfair and somewhat absurd to try and force people to hold opinions. But, that said, I think if you do have real opinions about the government, you ought to vote. It’s easy to get an absentee ballot, it doesn’t take very long, and we can do our small part to change the outcome in the system. The odds may be stacked against us in juries, but an election is something we can still affect.

Well, not this one, seeing as I guess it’s already happened. Time travel is confusing like that.