Officials in Fairfax County, Va., recently wondered why so few college students take advantage of the county’s absentee ballot program, so they did what government officials normally do when they encounter a perplexing question: They convened a “focus group.” That’s a fancy-sounding way of saying: They asked some college kids why they don’t vote.
The answer they discovered has generated some ridicule. The reason a lot of college kids don’t vote absentee, so they say, is that they can’t figure out how to buy stamps. Lisa Connors, an official with the Fairfax County Office of Public Affairs, tells local radio station WTOP that “the students will go through the process of applying for a mail-in absentee ballot—they will fill out the ballot, and then, they don’t know where to get stamps. . . . They all agreed that they knew lots of people who did not send in their ballots because it was too much of a hassle or they didn’t know where to get a stamp.”
We will grant that a young person bright enough to gain acceptance to college ought to possess sufficient intelligence to buy a stamp. Ha ha, those lazy millennials, etc., etc.
Still, we view the students’ quandary with a smidgen of sympathy. It’s a shame and an outrage that the most advanced nation in the world still requires people wishing to send an envelope from one location to another first to obtain an overpriced government-issued sticker. We bear no ill will toward employees of the U.S. Postal Service, who mostly perform their jobs well under artificially constrained circumstances, but federal laws preventing private companies from delivering envelopes have made the simple act of sending a thank-you note to Grandma one of the most irksome and time-consuming activities in American life.
We can sympathize with 18-to-20-year-olds who, accustomed as they are to email and the hyperefficient delivery systems of UPS and FedEx, find the task of getting a stamp strange and confusing. When else does an ordinary American have to stand in an inert, almost Soviet-length line simply to buy an everyday product? Why is it that declining demand drives the price of USPS stamps higher rather than lower? Sorry, we’re with the kids on this one.
