The Continuance of the Buzzword.

Jonah Goldberg chimed in yesterday on "The myth of the disenfranchised."

The article has important background information, but here's the highly telling conclusion:

Already, in state after state, the Democrats have said that voter confusion over how to vote constitutes voter disenfranchisement. But, as George Will recently noted, disenfranchisement is something the government does to you. It's not something you do to yourself. If you can't figure out how to fill in the ovals or punch the chads - and some minority of voters will always botch it - that doesn't mean your right to vote was rescinded. It means that you didn't take your right to vote seriously enough to pay attention to the instructions. Democracy requires two things: an electorate that takes its responsibilities seriously and small-d democrats of all parties who take the process seriously.

Judged on these two criteria, it's hard to see how the Democrats can call themselves democrats.

Frankly, this is all a little mind boggling to me. The vast majority of polls have the race as a tie or Bush ahead. If it was reversed and Kerry was ahead, but closely so, then I could understand the Democrats claiming that a Bush win on election day equal voter fraud. But with the consensus of polls placing Kerry behind, the Democrats are both insulting pollsters and ridiculously claiming fraud and disenfranchisement ahead of time. Jonah's right here. A voter's inability to successfully vote isn't disenfranchisement - it's disinterest or laziness because they have months, YEARS, to find out how to vote correctly. I'm sure the board of election would be happy to meet with voters and help them learn the ins and outs of the complicated voting process.

But this is just another incidence of Democrats inability to encourage personal responsibility on the part of America's citizens. Instead of empowering people and urging them to be completely informed on something as important as voting, they are preparing to claim that the responsibility lies with the elderly poll workers who are somehow "disenfranchising" other senior citizens on Election day.