While I normally fix my stary fashion gaze and incisive observations on such vital fashion issues as litigator décolletage, Timothy Zick at Concurring Opinions has raised the very timely question of what to wear to the polls when voting for your fav candidate. With the election less than 3 weeks away, and given time for proper tailoring, such important decisions must be made immediately.
Zick, a ConLaw prof at William & Mary, naturally looks to his local fashion peer group for guidance:
The Commonwealth of Virginia is the latest state to impose restrictions on what voters may wear when they go to the polls in early November. According the AP report:
The State Board of Elections yesterday voted to ban clothing and hats as well as buttons and other paraphernalia that directly advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate or issue.
The American Civil Liberties Union argued that the ban violates the First Amendment’s right to free speech. The board, however, said it has to weigh that against the right to vote free of undue influence or the tension that candidate advocacy might create.
Not to be rude, but when has anyone looked to the ACLU for exemplary fashion sense? Imagine what they’d come up with if they applied the 9th Amendment to high heels? Scary.
Zick likens the issue to clothing worn by kids at school, clearly not a place where any self-respecting fashionista wants to go.
The controversy over election apparel reminds me of the problems that are constantly arising in public schools regarding t-shirts and other apparel students are permitted — or not permitted — to wear during school hours and on school grounds. But there administrators and courts are at least generally guided by principles like the Tinker “disruption” standard. By contrast, the states that have imposed apparel limitations appear to take the position that simply wearing a button may “unduly influence” voters and interfere with the franchise. Considering that those at the polls are adults, and further considering that there is nothing intrusive or disruptive about merely wearing one’s support on one’s sleeve, or head, or jacket, this strikes me as overbroad.
While the analogy may make some sense when the concerns are limited to the question of whether campaign clothing is “disruptive” to the polling place, creating “sites of political unrest” as Zick describes it, my sense is that it misses the fundamental point. While no one hopes for t-shirt wars, it need not go anywhere near that far to present the problem that apolitical attire seeks to address. Isn’t plain old good taste reason enough? No? Sigh.
Voting takes place at a polling place, a refuge from the campaign that is meant to be free of political influences, neutral in every respect, allowing voters to exercise the franchise free from any sense of political pressure or influence. The idea that the free speech of voters is infringed by their wearing of buttons or clothing that endorses a candidate or promotes a position or party may be true in the smallest sense, there are few aspects of a democracy that are more compelling in its fundamental need for freedom from pressure and influence than the polling place.
Ironically, the comparison between the polling place and school falls apart even more distinctly when one considers that a school is a place where its primary function is to promote thought and ideas, which can compete in the marketplace (or lunch room) and elevate the consciousness of students and their concern for issues of consequences in their lives. That school officials find idea “disruptive” is itself a bit of a fashion problem for me.
On the other hand, the voting booth exists for the explicit purpose of expressing one’s freedom, not by screaming it with garish buttons or hats or t-shirts, but by pulling a lever (assuming they still pull levers in Virginia). Would we support the fellow who votes slowly, singing “Obama’s an arab” or “McCain’s senile” during his lengthy stay in the voting booth?
No, there is nothing wrong with wearing a t-shirt as one enters the polls, or even a hat assuming that it’s raining, but to garnish one’s attire with political messages for the purpose of defiling the one refuge from politicking is both unnecessary and, frankly, quite tacky.
Let’s save the buttons for the rallies, and demonstrate some restraint when dressing for the vote. Please.
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Either Virginians must vote nude, or the AP has run out of commas again.
Talk about a disruption at the voting booth. If memory serves, Lynchburg, Virginia was cited as the fatest place in American. I can’t bear to think about it. Hey, AP editors, don’t give us nightmares for lack of proper punctuation.
That works okay. I’d’ve rendered it:
Amazing how a well-placed comma changes everything.
Can I get a ruling on Hawaiian shirts?
Punctuation is important; it’s the main difference between the curious, “What’s that on the road ahead?” and the horrified, “What’s that on the road? A head?”
Better than photographers’ vests.
Tacky, yet politically acceptable.
Well, that was my other choice. I’m strangely bothered that you seem to have anticipated that.
And I was going to suggest dark colors or horizontal stripes.
Horizontal?
Sorry. Occupational hazard.
Whew.
Yes, Alex, I’ll take “concealed carry cliches” for $500.
. . . or “Scott thinks the government is dangerous” and “‘Scott,’ thinks the government, ‘is dangerous.'”
Scott, I’m curious: have you ever changed your vote, or for that matter your opinion on anything, based on what you read on a t-shirt, a button, or a hat?
T-shirts, all the time. Button, once (having to do with “my honor student can beat up your honor student”). Hat, never. I find hats particularly unpersuasive, but a good t-shirt is worth a 1000 words.
Or more. My favorite”>http://www.thoseshirts.com/diversity.html>favorite t-shirt is worth precisely 18,000 words, and has been known — in other situations — to dramatically improve generally good customer service.
You’re in good company: it seems that buttons and other tchotchkes are far too persuasive for the delicate minds of fragile Illinois college students.
In circumstances like that, I wonder how much of an impact professorial “influence” has on young minds. You tell them that the profs are brilliant and they should learn and absorb from them, and then the profs impart their politics along with their chemistry. I know, sounds juvenile, but it still bothers me some.
And while t-shirts don’t really change my mind too often, I still think the polling place should remain pristine and free from electioneering. I think that once that wall is breached, it becomes a pressure cooker.
I’m of two minds on the matter.
On one hand, I think that bumper stickers, tshirts, and vanity plates are rather vulgur forms of self-expression. (“I’m an individual! It says so on my license plate!”) I would be happier if people learned to articulate their own reasoned arguments to support their opinions rather than buying pre-fab slogans produced by sweatshop labor in third world countries. But I guess I’m just an elitist snob that way.
On the other hand, it worries me that here in the soi-dit land of the free, freedom of speech and freedom of expression seem to get thrown under the bus a lot these days.
Each to his/her own, but I don’t think those views are in conflict with each other. Then again, since I agree with both of them, I kinda would.
(Around here, at one point, some mean person — it wasn’t me, I swear — got a bunch of small, round stickers with a picture of a screw [you know, the bolt-like thing?] and started putting them over the heart symbol on bumper stickers and such.)
When you decline to do something you have a right to do because you think it’s in bad taste, that’s freedom; when you decline to, say, put up a lawn sign because you’re afraid that it might be firebombed, that’s intimidation.
Now, while I used to have a slightly-politically-incorrect bumper sticker* on my car, I haven’t put one on the replacements. Is it because my taste in such matters has improved or because — on at least one occasion; I happened to overhear the conversation between two cops who were in the same coffee shop that I was — it got my plates run?
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* “Criminals [heart-symbol] unarmed victims”. I took the bumper sticker off the car when some mean person put a screw symbol over the heart symbol, because that was a bit much even for me.