::A Geek in Korea::

I finally received my official ballot for absentee voting. This was nearly a month after I sent the registration form into my county. I guess I did it correctly, because I’m allowed to vote. Anyway, having never actually voted before (secret shame) I think the process has changed for me now that I am an English teacher. One of the best guides I found for voting was from The League of Women Voters.

I used the candidate’s answers to see their qualifications, their style, and also their general philosophy. Since I don’t live in my home county, don’t plan to live in my home state for the next few years, and don’t have any tax burden due to my salary being earned and taxed abroad, most of the issues didn’t affect me directly. They affect my family in some sense, but that’s about it. I’m not taking my civic responsibility lightly however, so I did take more than an hour of my time to vote on each of the local candidates I thought were most responsible.

There were a few qualifications they needed to meet to get my vote. They had to have a website, or answer questions to give me a chance to find more information about them. If they aren’t on the Internet at all, they were instantly disqualified. Other than that, party and past experience weren’t factors in my decision.

The one thing I noticed was that some of the candidates definitely weren’t being elected on the strength of their English grammar. While I am a blogger who exercises the occasional lapse in the strict rules of grammar for humorous, or stylistic choice, I am not a person seeking political office asking for the confidence of the American people.

If a 100 word response to a voting questionnaire has MULTIPLE, GLARING GRAMMATICAL ERRORS, WEIRD FORMATING, OR ANY MISTAKES, there is NO WAY I am going to deem you competent to hold public office. If you can’t write a complete sentence, you don’t deserve my vote. Even with the limitations of 100 words, you need to be able to express yourself coherently. That sort of information is like a resume. Any error should be near instantaneous rejection for the position. If I can write a completely understandable post in Twitter in 140 characters, you have no excuse for not being able to answer a question in a single paragraph.

Some of the mistakes I found might have been typographical in nature if they weren’t deeply structural. I didn’t use grammar as the final arbiter of my vote, but it was a factor. Yes, my English teaching job has finally pushed me over into doing things that 3rd grade teacher you hated in Elementary School might say when you didn’t write a sentence the proper verb tense. “If you write like that….you’ll never be elected to the County Recorder’s office!”

You might have hated that 3rd grade teacher, but low and behold, there are grammar issue voters.

Sad to say, there was more than one occasion where one or more candidates had fluff answers, equal resumes, and multiple grammatical errors. Both candidates were disqualified on my English grammar standard. Formating and other issues then had to be resolved. If you cheat on a 100 word response and use non-standard characters to save space that doesn’t make you look good. Get a better vocabulary or reformulate your platform. Don’t use “+” when you mean “AND”. That’s just lazy.

If a candidate doesn’t know how to use word wrap or bullet points, do they really know what they are doing creating a document? If you don’t have basic computer literacy skills, do I want you crafting documents that affect your constituents? If your website response like molasses, how will you respond when people need to reach you in a crisis?

I know choosing between two evenly matched candidates based partially on grammar is ridiculous, but if all a guy on the other side of the world can find out about you is that you can’t put together a coherent sentence, you get what you deserve if you lose. Sorry.