With the election finally over, the groundhogs (aka politicians) can safely return to their holes for a few months and begin collecting dirt that will turn into mud come primary time. After witnessing campaigns that made all of us shake our heads and ask, “Does (insert politician name here) wash both faces when he/she gets up in the morning?” we can breathe a sign of relief and revel in the fact that it’s over.
While many of you were heading off to your local polling place to cast your vote for the least offensive person on the ballot, I stayed home relishing in the fact that nobody running in my district was worth the ten minutes it would have taken me to vote.
I did take a moment while watching the returns on television last night to ponder our system of putting people into office. I thought about how voters need to make their way to a polling place and cast their votes electronically, on paper or by some other means and said thought to myself, “what if we could vote via Facebook?”
Think about it for a moment.
Say you wanted to run for Luzerne County Judge so you could steal a couple million like Mikey Conahan and his pal Mark Ciavarella did. You could mount a campaign on Facebook asking all your friends to come to your page and “Like” you. The judicial candidate with the most “Likes” would be proclaimed the winner.
Want to run for county agent in charge of agriculture? Mount a Facebook campaign that touts the prosperity of your chicken ranch on Farmville. Gather up all your friends, have them “Like” you and just like George W. Bush, you’re in!
It would be easy to weed out candidates who spend more time in a 3rd dimension than in the real world just by looking at their Facebook wall. If they spend too many hours playing Bejeweled, they probably won’t make a good county commissioner. If they share YouTube videos of themselves “pretending” to pick up hookers, they’re not going to make a very good district attorney.
Everyone wants transparency in a candidate and Facebook will certainly provide that. You’ll know right away when your candidate of choice was cheating on his wife when she changes her relationship status to “Separated” and “It’s Complicated.” Want to know if that really was your senator drunk at that bachelor party last night? Check his wall and look for “Senator X checked in at Satin Dolls.” And God knows we’re not ready for that good looking state representative who is the heart-throb of every woman under 40 to change his “Interested In” to “Men.”
Voting via Facebook will never be a reality, but it’s interesting to think of the possibilities that would surround such a notion. What worries me the most about something like this is the fact that there’s a good chance someone by the name of Mickey Mouse may get more “Likes” than Barack Obama in 2012 and actually win.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.