Factual Dispatch #53: Civic Reserves

In lieu of attempting to stay on top of the news today, I’ll just remind everyone to breathe, have some real tea, and not think to look at the returns until at least 9pm tonight. To distract you from the present, instead imagine an idea I’ve been wrestling with for years: The Civic Reserves.

Elections in the USA are staffed by volunteers or severely underpaid workers, stressed to the point of breaking, while literally being the last line of defense against election fraud and greater tyranny. These people work 12+ hour days for weeks at a time, helping the poor, confused, mentally ill, recently nationalized, or simply moronic, contribute their voice to the Cacophony of Democracy that is our election process. And they are paid peanuts. Not even half of the states pay their state-level minimum hourly wage or more than a $100 per diem:

If you know anyone who works in elections, this is nothing new. But why do we accept it? I’ve read masthead/Last Page editor-in-chief missives in Newsweek, New York Times, or US News & World Report every 6-8 months since I was in HS about changing our elections. They all ask for a single day to vote as a national holiday, or discuss some paltry funding increases to federal & state level election budgets that would most likely get cut by the next GOP president. I am thinking slightly bigger.

What if we took the old Army Reserves model (“one weekend a month, two weeks a year”) but applied it to the infrastructure of democracy? Responding to the Great Depression, the USA created the Civilian Conservation Corps & the Tennessee Valley Authority. This put work into the hands of thousands of unemployed citizens, and changed the landscape of the nation forever. Building dams, highways, replanting forests, cleaning brush, and getting paid a good wage to do it, infused both capital and pride into America’s labor force. What if we put a real wage and real support into this infrastructure? How can we even pretend to “bring democracy to the world” when we can’t even bring democracy to Harris County, TX?

Just imagine, a state-by-state initiative to put cash into the hands of the long-term unemployed, disabled, elderly, or previously incarcerated, for doing the deeply needed work of upgrading our electoral infrastructure and compensating the thousands of workers who take weeks out of their lives every time we do this civic square dance.

I leave you with this jaw-dropping research that explains a neat little stretch of blue voting land that starts in Arkansas and Louisiana, and then swoops up through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and into the Carolinas.

Turns out the chalk from the Cretaceous period solidified into fertile dirt that drove plantation concentration. To quote the summary:

Don’t mistake the forest for the trees, a better world is possible. Just be careful who you are hoping will help guide you.

Song of the Dispatch: This Tom Waits cover of a traditional Italian AntiFascist song, that has been sung at protests from Massachusetts to Malaysia, Tallahassee to Thailand, was released to help motivate people during the 2018 protests. May it work:

You’re missed,T