Why I Never Ask People to Vote


This Tuesday, November 6th, is Election Day.  Oddly, I am not going to ask you to vote.  [More on that later.]

Voting patterns are interesting; some are predictable, others present a mystery.  For example, why do Minnesotans vote more than anyone else in the country?  Why are Texas and West Virginia, two states with nothing in common in size, geography or demographics, at the bottom of that list of voters?  If you are female, older, and well educated you are more likely to vote.  Eighteen to 29-year-olds are the least engaged—strange for people who are sure they know it all. 

In the last election 2 million (!!!) minority voters who had voted for Obama twice did not bother to go to the polls for Clinton.  Obama won Michigan in 2012 by 350,000 votes, Clinton lost by roughly 10,000. In Detroit and Wayne Counties more than 75,000 Motown Obama voters simply stayed at home. If even 2% of those who stayed home had voted for Clinton, Michigan would have stayed blue.  If, in North Carolina, blacks had turned out for Clinton as they had for Obama, she would have won the state.  In Wisconsin Trump received exactly the same number of votes as Romney did in 2012.  But Clinton got 230,000 votes less than Obama did. She lost by 30,000 votes.  Romney lost Wisconsin but Trump won the state because the voters who voted for a Black man twice would not vote for a white woman once.  If you want to talk about racism and sexism, chew on that one.  All she needed was just 8% of the vote that showed up for Obama.

If Clinton wins Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina she wins the election.  And this off-year election would have an entirely different slant, feel and purpose. 

If I had my way every eligible citizen would be given a free picture ID, and a valid address which they would use to vote.  I would set up voter registration kiosks at every grocery store in the state to make it as convenient as possible.  I want everyone who is eligible to vote to do so.  I am ready to make it as easy as protection of the integrity of the process allows.   But, it is time to stop cajoling people to get to the polls.  Why won’t I beg you to vote?  Because I shouldn’t have to.  Voting is a privilege worth a little discomfort, a little trouble, a rearrangement of your day. 

I have registered to vote when I had to walk several blocks to get to City Hall.  I have hauled my girls in a wagon behind me to get to the polls.  I have stood in freezing lines covered in sleet to vote.  I have set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. to vote before work.  If you are too lazy, too ignorant, too self-absorbed to haul your sorry behind to the polls I am neither going to beg for your participation or regret your absence.  If you want an adult franchise, act like an adult. 

Reminding an adult to vote is like reminding them to wash their hands after using the toilet.  If you have to ask, you’ve already lost the battle. 

             I voted, because I keep the faith.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Generation of Serfs

  On October 25, 1415, Henry V of England laid some serious hurt on the French at the Battle of Agincourt at Pas-de-Calais, France.   Part of the success of this campaign was due to Henry’s use of the longbow, but part of it also goes to the creative use of military indentures.   These legal contracts required all the English captains to provide specified amounts of men, material and time to the King’s cause.             An indenture was a document, written in duplicate and then torn along a jagged line, like little teeth ( dents ), in the paper.   One portion of the contract was in possession of each party and when the required conditions and period of service were fulfilled, the parts reunited, and the debt was considered paid.   Many of the people who first came to this country from England came as indentured servants, worked off their debt and became the backbone of the country.             Today we are creating a nation not of indentured servants, someone with a carefully
Read more

Our Beautiful Constitution and its Ugly Opponents

 The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world!   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God, I would simply ask them how else so many geniuses in the matter of human governance could have been clustered together in the right time and place to create both our country and the means to govern it.    Our founding fathers had the vision to devise a way to not only govern themselves, but govern a country that they could not imagine, yet believed would prevail. The constitution of the United States is like a good parent.   It has allowed us to grow up as we have grown older, with the result that the United States of America is the oldest living democracy in the world.   The miracle of this document is that it lives, breathes and moves with the times.   The three branches of our government work together while standing alone
Read more

"You Didn't Build That:" Part I

Late in the day on Friday, July 13 th , President Obama mounted the stage of Historic Firehouse Number One in Roanoke , Virginia .   The room held around 800 people but it was hot and several people fainted.   In front of a carefully screened group of supporters he gave one of the most important speeches of his reelection campaign.    It was not meant to be a major speech.   That will come in the even more carefully scripted Convention Hall in Charlotte , North Carolina this September in front of adoring media and rabid political supporters.   But this speech in Roanoke is crucial to the 2012 election because on Friday, in Virginia , President Obama went off message.   Whether through error or hubris, he abandoned his script and spoke off the cuff.   And in so doing, he showed us the man behind the curtain.   The angry but controlled, insecure yet charismatic, market fearful, socialistically inclined man that Barrack Obama really is. I am speaking, of course, of the now famou
Read more