This past Friday a dude I know (he was a GED student my wife had tutored) called to ask me if I had any work for his 18-year-old son, who’s a student/athlete at the Ginn Academy. Of course I found — actually sorta made up — some work for the young man to do, and he performed with diligence and alacrity. His father has been trying (successfully, I might add) to keep his son on the straight-and-narrow in a very tough and gang-infected part of town. But all young men need a few dollars in their pocket, so I always help whenever I can.
As I was driving him home, I passed a census registration tent located at Thurgood Marshall Rec Center, which caused me to then ask the young man if he was registered to vote. Although he had previously told me that he got pretty fair grades in school, he looked at me as if I had just asked him if he had a license to pilot the Space Shuttle.
“No,” he responded, causing me to almost wreck my pickup truck.
“Houston, we have a problem,” was all I could recall thinking. But what I immediately said was that it would be impossible for me to hire him again unless he got registered.
The young man (whom I had shown a scant four hours prior the proper amount of firmness to be applied by men when shaking hands) then asked, “But my one vote won’t count, will it?”
Again, gripping the wheel of my vehicle to avoid crashing into a fireplug that was fast approaching on the right, I said, with all of the evenness I could muster, “Young man, they only count them one vote at a time, so of course your vote matters just as much as the president’s.”
Then it hit me: How many other young similarly situated young people are not registered? Even if his dad (who, when I called him, thanked me profusely for raising the issue with his son and is registered himself) had overlooked making sure his son was registered, what about the school he attends, did they ever bring the issue up in classes? Judging by his reaction I think not.
My first thought was to compensate this young man for registering all of his friends, as well as his neighbors in the CMHA highrise where he lives, since these buildings (there are eight of them in Ward 7) have the lowest percent of voter participation in the ward. However, the Ohio Revised Code has restrictions on paying anyone a bounty to collect signatures.
The statute states that it’s against the law to compensate anyone on a “fee per registration” basis. But it doesn’t preclude me from hiring him on a per-hour basis to register people to vote. He then turns the cards into me and I personally take them down to the Board of Elections. Anyone who wants to kick in a few bucks to help me pay this young man, we can figure out a way for you to do so.
In reality, this is what the Democratic Party should be doing (searching out new voters in the projects and other inner-city neighborhoods where many of the unregistered reside) but what do party leaders do instead? These clucks continue to give money to any jackleg preacher who always promises he can turn out the vote of his black church members, who were going to vote anyway, no matter if the preacher/conman got his palm greased or not.
What was it Will Rogers said when asked about his political affiliation? “I don’t belong to any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.”
