There's a website/movement devoted to encouraging New York City residents to "vote from your second home."
I'm all for people voting and, if the law permits, as it apparently does in New York, people to choose where to vote, for sure let them choose where they think their vote will be most worthwhile. However, I've seen at least some references to this in the context of the drive to flip Congress to Democrat from Republican.
There it starts to get interesting, or at least ironic, as one of the frequently heard complaints (accurate or not) against Congressional Republicans is that they are cutting services to the poor to pay for tax cuts to the rich, and one of the complaints (accurate or not) against Democrats is that they are a bunch of urban limousine liberals with contempt for rural Americans. The idea that urban dwellers wealthy enough to afford vacation homes should use their political power to dilute that of rural Americans who aren't lucky enough to have a choice of homes from which to vote seems like it treads awfully close to non-egalitarian means to achieve (allegedly) egalitarian ends.
Another, maybe more stark, way of putting this is that the people with vacation homes who talk or think like this — yeah, that's the ticket, if we only just all voted from our vacation homes instead of Manhattan or the District of Columbia, we could totally take back the House — do not realize at all how ridiculous they sound to people who only have one home. Tensions between "year-rounders" and "summer people" are already features of many such communities. Adding national politics to the mix might not be precisely the trick to improve neighborly relations. The Democrats may say, hey, Trump is splitting up immigrant families and appointing a Supreme Court that is going to take away abortion rights, neighborly relations are a lower priority. Anyway, the idea made me chuckle.
 (Image source: Tom Arthur/Wikimedia Commons) |
