I wanted to beat what I hoped would be the after-work voting crush, so around 4:30 I saddled up my oldest and youngest in the car. My oldest daughter was feeling crabby yesterday: “I don’t want to go, voting sounds boring!”, until my wife said “It’s in a secret booth, where no-one can see you.” “That’s right,” I added, “And no-one else will know who we voted for except you.” She hopped in the car, and we headed over.Â

She was excited to pull the levers for me, and to get an “I voted” sticker.  I asked the poll workers how many folks had voted, and in the 2 EDs they were handling, only 30 people out of 400 GOPers + 300 Dems had voted. We lamented the lack of interest, and mourned the passing of the lever voting machines. I told them about the disasters going on in Maryland’s primary with their electronic voting machines, which were railroaded in despite the many problems. The poll workers really seemed jazzed about a voter being interested and knowledgeable about these things.

On the way back, my daughter went back to crabby mode. “You promised me a story!” So to keep myself from going insane with another boring story, and to keep it topical, I decided to illustrate why we vote. I was at a loss, at first. She’s probably typical of the electorate, at least in terms of interest level in politics. Typical voters, I’ve found, aren’t political junkies like me, they would rather read the fine print on their insurance policy than try to understand legislation and how it affects them.

But then I thought, hey, this is a great test to see what kind of narrative I can come up with to explain why we vote in an engaging way. Here’s what I came up with.

Once upon a time, there was a nice man who wanted to save the day. He was tired of the Mean People. They were always taking things from people and saying mean things about them. The nice man said, “That’s not very nice. There should be rules to say the Mean People can’t do those things.”Â

His friends said, “Oh well, that’s just the way it is. You can’t do anything about it.”

“Yes there is! I’ll run for office!” the nice man said. “What do you mean?” his friends asked. “It means I’ll tell people to vote for me, and if I get enough votes, I’ll get elected, then I’ll be able to make rules that say ‘Mean People, if you keep doing those mean things, you’ll go to JAIL!!!” (She liked the drama.)

So the nice man went to people’s houses, and had parties, and everywhere he went, people said “Wow, what a nice man. I like that he’ll stop the Mean People from being mean.”

Well, the Mean People were scared and angry about this. They had lots of money to go on TV and pay people to say mean things about the nice man. They would say “He’s just a whiny baby, AND he poops his pants!!!” People began to say, “Hmmm, he says he’s a nice man, but I keep hearing over and over that he’s just a whiny baby. Maybe I won’t vote for him.”

But the nice man kept trying, since he knew it was too important to give up. He kept talking to people, and worked hard, and when Election Day came, enough people voted for him, and he won!

“Did the Mean People go to jail then?” asked my daughter?Â

I guess we’ll see in 2 months.