"It's Time to Vote" Whispers the GOP at 1am on a Wednesday

Asleep in your bed from a long day, you roll over. Without waking, driven by muscle memory, you flip your pillow to the other side. A cooler side. A deeper sleep.

Miles away from your bedroom, inside of a locked city hall, a hushed muttering floats through the midnight summer breeze.

“It’s time to vote,” whispers the GOP at 1am on a Wednesday.

Carried softly by a faint wind, the words are barely more than sounds. They swoon, unsure of their own existence. By the time they reach your exposed ear, they are barely a memory.

“We’re holding a monumentally important election today,” the Republican caucus murmurs in the middle of the night, “An election to derail all future votes.”

But the words escape on a tender zephyr, gently falling like scattered feathers to the ground, drowned by the early morning dew.

As the country sleeps, a single ballot box is unlocked. The cavernous hall snuffs out the weak click of a key.

A sign hangs above the booth. In font too small to register on military radar, someone has written: “Don’t forget to vote!”

The sign itself? The size of a thumbtack.

And now no sound escapes at all — the legislators simply mouth along to an unheard track:

“Polls open at 2am and close at 2:45am.”

At 2:51am, you pull yourself out of bed. Six minutes too late. No matter — you’re headed straight to the bathroom in a foggy half-asleep haze. You had to pee. You have no idea you had to vote.

---

Pre-Order My Book

As you know, my upcoming collection of satirical essays called This Won’t Help: Modest Proposals for a More Enjoyable Apocalypse comes out October 24. You can pre-order it at any of the book-sellers linked here.

---

Behind the Writing

Thankfully, the people of Ohio turned out yesterday to vote down the latest Republican attempt to destroy any semblance of democracy.

Washington Post

Are you surprised to be hearing about the results of a ballot initiative in August? You should be. August is, famously, a time of travel and vacation in the US — not only vacation from work, but vacation from news and media consumption. In fact, that’s why the state of Ohio itself banned almost all August elections last year. Late-summer elections fail to engage a meaningful amount of voters in the democratic process.

But that didn’t stop the state’s decrepit GOP from white-knuckling their last grip on the American voter by doubling back on that ban and deciding to hold a very specific and self-beneficial election yesterday.

One thing is abundantly clear: As we approach the 2024 election, these Late-Stage Republican tactics will only increase, and become more loathsome, ruthless, and anti-democratic.

I don’t have a joke for that. But I am trademarking the term Late-Stage Republican™.

See you next week.