Please pass on this important information:
Due to the unusually large turnout expected, this year’s election will be held over a two-day period. Republicans will vote on Tuesday, November 7th, Democrats on the following day.
Twelve years ago, two weeks before the 2000 presidential election, I sent out the above notice, just for a lark. I sent this obviously absurd announcement via email to various nationally known pundits I was in regular communication with. A couple of days later, I posted it on FreeRepublic.com (categorized as humor). It was Friday of the following week before I found out what a ruckus I had caused.
A farmer friend of mine who’s a staunch conservative and Fox News junkie called to check in and asked what I’d been doing since we’d last spoken. Not much, I told him. Then I remembered the gag.
“Oh, there is one thing,” I confided. “You’ll like this. Last week, I sent out this silly notice about how they’re expecting a big turnout for the election, so it’ll have to be held over two days, with Republicans voting on Tuesday and Democrats on Wednesday.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. If I hadn’t been able to hear Bill O’Reilly or some other Fox commentator in the background on his television, I’d have thought we’d been disconnected.
“You still there?” I asked.
“You don’t know what’s going on, do you?” he responded.
When I admitted I didn’t (I hadn’t watched television news in 15 years or more), he proceeded to tell me that my two-day election gag was one of the hottest topics on the tube and that Democrats were furious about it, seriously concerned that it might suppress their turnout and even threatening to prosecute the unknown person responsible.
My little prank had taken on a life of its own. It was being passed on and reposted all over the place. Every time it showed up somewhere, it was worded a little different or embellished slightly. (Humorless liberals even passed it on, inverting the two-day arrangement in the vain hope of deceiving Republicans.)
I’d had no idea how easy it was to propagate a hoax. I hadn’t expected anyone to take it seriously, but had figured that anyone gullible enough to believe it didn’t deserve to vote. A couple of the pundit-friends who published it even emphasized the bogus nature of the announcement. That they felt obliged to explain a simple gag is a sad commentary on the quality of the American electorate. That Democrats feared it might reduce their turnout is sadder still.
Saddest of all, however, was the reaction of various election officials across the country, who warned of potential prosecution for the culprit. I was confident that the First Amendment protected my right to crack a joke, but I’d have been happy to have a national forum in which to make my case that it’s not finance reform we need, but franchise reform.
The gag has been resurrected in each of the subsequent three presidential elections and is now a fixture of campaign comedy.