last updated: 4 November 2018 (approximate reading time: 6 minutes; 1139 words)
I’m an American, writing this days before an American election, focusing on the American experience. However, these concepts about the importance of voting in a representative democracy are universal.
Everyone from politicians to celebrities are out there spreading the word of how important voting is. They’re trying to engage, enrage, cajole, beg, and guilt people into voting. Why are they trying so hard, you ask?
You have to ask yourself, when you look at what is going on in your city, your county, your state, your nation. Do you like it? Do you feel that your representatives at each level are representing your viewpoint? Do you look outside your window, and agree with the direction that this country has taken as far as women’s rights, marriage rights, minority rights, racism, anti-semitism, and so on? Are you okay with raising taxes on most citizens to give handouts to billionaires, turning the United States into a panic room terrified of outsiders, waging trade wars against the rest of the world that make prices here go up while wages don’t? Do you like the fact that the current leadership is so blindly focused on loading the courts with justices who promise to remove individual rights and environmental protections that they’ll put their weight to force through alcoholic sexual assaulters as long as they swear allegiance to their ideology?
If you’re not happy, you’ve got to vote. But not just you. Everyone who agrees with you. Because here’s the thing: Democracy only works if a lot of people vote. Each vote makes a difference, but not the difference. To make the difference, it takes turnout. And sadly, the United States has pitiful voter turnout. In other countries, voter turnout can top 80%. Here, usually less than 50% of registered voters actually turn out at the polls. That means that a minority of the country—those who can be bothered to vote—are the ones who determine who leads the country. And we can argue about if the electoral college or Russian hacking (I’ll get back to this) or whatever else is to blame for 2016, but the bottom line is that if more people in more states voted, that could have changed everything.
The thing that always gets me is when the majority, the ones who didn’t vote for the minority candidates who win, complain that the government isn’t reflecting their values, well, guess what? By not voting, you are still making a choice. You had an opportunity to choose your representative, and instead chose to let other people decide. You don’t like who you chose by not choosing? The good news is that you can make right on your previous abdication of your choice, by voting in the next election (in this case, on Tuesday, November 6th).
Okay, here’s the thing: lots of people will tell you to vote, and who to vote for. I certainly have my preferences, and want you to vote the way I want to vote, so that our combined votes can add up to make positive change. But as tempting as it might be for me to use this platform to tell you who to vote for, instead I’m going to tell you to do your own research. And that doesn’t mean Fox News or Slate.com or other extremely biased outlets. Yes, every organization has an bias, just like you do and I do, but we should get in the habit of looking at multiple “center-ish” sources, sources that may lean a bit left and a bit right, get the facts and data from multiple sources, read journalists who are reasonable and base their articles on evidence and data, and the use those sources with journalistic integrity to make decisions. It might be emotionally fulfilling to hear some angry talking head spouting off exactly what we want to hear, but that doesn’t make it true.
Yes, getting information from multiple sources with journalistic integrity is a pain in the ass if you don’t like reading about politics. And research takes time, time that we don’t have. I’ll admit that it’s tempting to just find someone else whom you agree with, or to take the voting recommendations from one political party, and just go down the list, letting them do your thinking for you. But that’s really only one step above not voting—that’s surrendering your vote. Even if you personally are a progressive and you agree with your progressive representatives, you still owe it to yourself, and to the concept of Democracy, to learn about what they’ve been supporting, and to hold them accountable.
There is no “bad way” to vote. Show up to your polling place during the hours it is open and rock your vote.
However, there are better ways than others. In most of the world, people vote on paper, using ink or some kind of punch card system (remember the hanging chad issue?). This isn’t 100% foolproof of course–votes can be “lost” and physically manipulated–but it takes a significant effort and conspiracy to do so.
In the United States, we’ve moved to electronic voting systems. These are more convenient, they don’t need to be manually counted, and so on. However, voting machines can be hacked. This isn’t just alarmism or science fiction: in Texas, voting machines have been changing votes. Whether this was malicious or due to faulty equipment is not the point; the point is that people want to vote one way, and by voting electronically, they have opened their vote to being manipulated far more easily than with a paper ballot.
(If one were cynical, one might suggest that perhaps this has been the goal of the powerful corporations pushing electronic voting in the USA–to build a system that they can easily manipulate. If one were cynical…)
In the USA, even though voting machines have gone hacker-friendly electronic, you still have the option of getting a mail-in, paper-and-ink ballot. And by the way, getting a “mail-in” ballot doesn’t mean you have to mail it in–you can walk it into your polling place, eliminating the possibility of your ballot getting lost in the mail. I would recommend everyone vote via paper ballot. It lets you vote in the comfort of your own home, you can do your research while you are voting, and you know your vote can’t be changed by the machine or by someone hacking into the machine.
I know that my essay can’t make you vote if you weren’t already going to. But know that even if you don’t vote, you’re still voting: you’re voting to let whomever other people want to rule you, rule you. Is that really want you want?
Really really?
Then vote.
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