I've been reading All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. It's about a well-meaning man who gets into politics to change things for the better, and ends up corrupt and morally bankrupted. It's quite fitting, in this election season. I can't decide whether to write in "None of the Above" on my ballot, or "Mickey Mouse." The wife insists that the former is a serious political statement, and hence in keeping with my civic duty, while the latter is too disrespectful. I've explained that disrespect is precisely what I'm aiming for. But then I got to thinking about it, and I don't think I'm willing to trust Mickey with the power that has amassed itself in Washington. I suspect anyone coming out of the Disney organization will be a control freak at heart, and what we need is someone with the good sense to recognize that the American people can do just fine, thank you very much, without micromanagement by the automatons who were active in college student government. I mean, have you met any of these people?

The main reason I'm going to vote, however, is not to scrawl something irritating on the "write-in" line, but to vote against the county commissioner running in my district. I caught his act on NPR recently, detailing his plans for economic growth. They turn on several expensive government projects, not surprisingly. In his worldview, prosperity depends on wise politicos like himself picking economic winners. Never mind that the only people who actually have some skill at this are working in start-ups or venture capital shops or hedge funds. To someone without an ounce of economics or history education, economic growth is just a game of blocks. Move some pieces here, move some pieces there -- all funded by the taxpayers, of course -- and the economy will be built into a thriving machine.

And the most delicious part of all this is that the guy is a Republican. His Democratic challenger, meanwhile, is running on a platform that amounts to not paying for the boondoggles he's proposed, firing county employees, and doing a comprehensive audit of past spending. Despite this fact, the Republican will probably win, because this is a Republican area. Even though this man's voting record is an affront to anyone who claims an affinity for liberty, he wears the right label. Party identification means nothing any more, and yet it determines how most people vote.

That last is an offensive observation to many, because they like to imagine great phalanxes of informed Aristotles marching into voting booths to exercise their collective wisdom. The reality is that most people either: a) are feigning ignorance in the presence of survey researchers, or b) have very little knowledge about the positions or past actions of the people for whom they vote.

This is why, of all the political news this Fall, the most distressing, to me, comes from Arizona, where voters today entertain the notion of creating a one million dollar voter lottery. The goal is to increase voter turnout in future elections, as if voting, in and of itself, is something good. When people don't vote, it is quite often because they are ignorant of the issues, apathetic about the outcome, or disgusted with the available choices. Low voter turnout, in other words, is an indictment of the education system, the candidates, and the name-calling, mud-slinging, ignorance-fostering methods that pass for campaigns these days. Citizens ought to be wary of governmental efforts to obscure this fact.

It's not just politicos who have an interest in propagating the notion that voting is a sacred duty. I read a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal about a pastor in Cincinnati who held up a Bible and announced to his congregation that they have "a moral obligation to vote." The gist of the piece was that evangelicals are once again preparing to hold their noses and support the likes of Mike DeWine in Ohio. It seems to me that in many races, given a choice between two unprincipled, blow-dried, cowardly, pandering buffoons, Christians have a moral obligation not to vote.

Or, you can do like me, sharpen your pencil, and tell the candidates that you prefer neither of them. I suppose you could give your vote to Mickey Mouse instead, and corrupt yet one more pea-brained performer by sending him to Washington. I, for one, don't want that on my conscience. Mickey, like many of the people with their names on ballots today, belongs in cartoons.