So, I was reading Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog entry the other day about ground level politics and it got me to thinking about something that’s been bugging me since election night. The thing that bugs me is that despite the fact that I cast my lot in the marketplace of ideas here every day, I really don’t do all that much to change this country or this world to be the place that I want it to be. For example, my next door neighbors are three guaranteed Democratic votes. They don’t know a whole lot about US politics, but they hate George W Bush with extreme passion. Unfortunately, they never registered to vote and so they didn’t get to cast their ballots on election night. Had I gotten off my duff back in October (the registration deadline was Oct 11) and gotten them voter registration cards, and then taken them to vote on election day, that would have been three more votes for our losing Democratic Senate candidate. The guy lost by about 200,000 votes — if 1/5 of the Democrats who voted could have found one other person to drag to the polls, he would have won. I could have picked up three without even trying very hard, and they have a lot of friends who probably didn’t vote either. It’s something to remember in 2004.

More on this here.