On Voting

A few days ago, I cast my vote in the local municipal election for Hutto, Texas, the town I now call home. Five things were on the ballot - the mayor, three of the six city council positions, and a bond package for Hutto Independent School District. All of these are of interest to me. The mayor and city council govern the community in which I live, and Hutto ISD is where my oldest daughter goes to school and where my two younger daughters will go as soon as they are old enough. The issues facing Hutto are typical of small but growing towns on the edge of larger urban areas. I voted for the bond package, being myself a teacher and obviously a strong supporter of public education. For the mayor and city councilors, I did my research on their backgrounds and positions, watched a livestream of a candidate forum (being unable to physically attend on account of having three kids), tried to judge how effectively the incumbents had been at running Hutto, and made my decisions accordingly.

I love voting. I vote because it makes me feel good. It's not just that I love sporting my "I Voted" sticker around, although I do. It's that I feel a certain thrill in exercising the most fundamental right of citizens in a republic like America - the right to participate in the choosing of our leaders. When I watch the returns on election night, I love to look at the numbers in the column of the candidates I voted for an reflect that, had I not done my civic duty, their total would have one fewer vote.

I vote because I don't want to be a hypocrite. Being a history and civics teacher, I feel especially obligated to be vote in every election, even the minor ones that get little or no attention in the media. After all, I tell my students regularly that those who don't vote don't matter. I despise hypocrisy in others and am therefore unwilling to tolerate it in myself, so I vote in every election no matter the inconvenience.

I vote because I don't want to be ungrateful. It's a cliche to point out that thousands of brave American men and women suffered and died to secure and defend our right to self-government, but it's a cliche that happens to be true. Whether we're talking about the seventy-seven immortal Minutemen who stood their ground on Lexington Green, the men who stormed ashore at Normady or Iwo Jima, or the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen currently fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, all Americans owe their right to self-government to the sacrifice of these brave warriors. Aside from hypocrisy, the vice I most despise is ingratitude. People who choose not to vote are being sickingly ungrateful, when you think about it.

I vote because it matters. In 2004, I worked as a staffer on a state legislative campaign in Texas. 68,663 votes were cast in that election and our campaign lost by 148 votes. If a mere seventy-four people had changed their minds, or if one hundred and 148 more people had shown up and cast their votes for my candidate, the outcome could have been different. For that matter, if 537 Ralph Nader supporters in Florida had instead voted for Al Gore, the whole course of history over the last twenty years would have been radically different. The incredibly slim outcome of the 2016 presidential election, which came down to a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, is well known.

In perhaps the most astonishing example, the 2016 elections saw one state legislative race quite literally tied at 11,607 to 11,607. Moreover, the uncertain outcome of this race determined whether the Democrats or Republicans would control the lower house of the Virginia state legislature, with enormous consequences for the eight-and-a-half million citizens of Virginia. In the end, the outcome was determined by drawing names out of a hat. If a single additional person had shown up to vote, it could have altered which party controlled the Virginia House of Delegates. So don't tell me that voting doesn't matter. It does.

I vote because, as a citizen, it's my job. As one of nearly three hundred and thirty million Americans, I am a cog in the vast machine that is the American republic. Every cog that comes loose in the form of a citizen that doesn't vote makes that machine work just a little bit less effectively. As a teacher, if I don't bother teaching classes, completing my paperwork, grading assignments, and so forth, I get fired. And that would be perfectly fair, because I in that case I wouldn't deserve to have my job. It's not possible to fire someone from citizenship, but people can fail to deserve their citizenship.

When I voted in the local Hutto elections, I made a point to bring my six-year-old daughter with me to the polls. When my two-year-old and ten-month-old are big enough to understand what voting is and why it's important (and, honestly, when they're easier to handle), I will be bringing them, too. I feel it's important that my children see me and my wife in the act of voting, to have it impressed upon them that this is something that people are expected to do, just like saying 'please' and 'thank you' and holding the door open for people coming in behind you. I strongly urge everyone to bring their children to the polling places with them when they go vote.

When I vote, even in a relatively minor election such as this, I am heir to traditions and values that can be traced back to Athens and the Roman Republic. The idea that governments should only exist by the consent of the governed and that the actions of governments must mirror the wills of the majority of their people was fused into the DNA of our nation by our Founding Fathers. It is the whole idea behind the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

It bothers me to no end that the United States of America, which is largely responsible for the spread of democracy over the globe during the last century, has such dismal voting numbers. The problem is well known but bears repeating. According to Pew Research, 55.7% of Americans eligible to vote actually did so in the 2016 presidential election. Compare this to 67.9% in France, 70.6% in Norway, 79% in Australia, and a whopping 87.2% in Belgium. In this crucial field, clearly, America is definitely not #1.

Unfortunately, there is a group of people in America far worse than citizens who choose to vote. These would be the sinister elements within our nation's political system who are intentionally trying to make it more difficult for people to vote.

First and foremost, we have so-called "Voter ID laws", which have been pushed in Republican-controlled states across the country. Ostensibly, these are intended to prevent non-citizens from voting by requiring state-issued identification such as driver's license. In truth, they are intended to limit voting by poor and minority voters, who are less likely to possess the necessary photo identification even though they are registered voters. This was clearly proven by the outstanding investigative reporting done by The Washington Post in its 2016 report on North Carolina's law. Any number of comprehensive studies have shown that voter ID laws disproportionately reduce minority turnout.

Preventing voter fraud by non-citizens is a classic red herring, because such fraud is so rare as to be statistically non-existent. Besides, if the goal is to prevent non-citizens from voting, the obvious answer would be the issuance of some sort of national ID card to be used in all elections, provided to all citizens for free. Nothing like that, to my knowledge, has been suggested by those pushing the voter ID laws.

Republicans also make strong efforts to limit the number of days for early voting. Many states with Republican-controlled governments purge their voter rolls of minority voters. North Dakota recently passed a law requiring voters to specify their street address, which effectively disenfranchised thousands of Native Americans (who tend to support the Democrats) as those who live on reservations typically don't have street addresses. Polling places are closed down in heavily minority areas and opened up heavily white areas. Laws of this sort are more appropriate for an authoritarian banana republic than a genuine democracy, yet sadly they are becoming increasingly common across the United States.

The vast majority of voter suppression in America is being done by Republicans, but Democrats are not entirely free from guilt on the issue. Their party has strongly resisted efforts to hold municipal elections on the same day as federal or state elections. This simple measure would be cheaper, logistically much easier, and increase pitifully low turnout in such elections. But it also would disadvantage the Democratic Party, which tends to dominate such local elections in urban areas due to the out-sized influence labor unions hold in such contests. Municipal elections would gauge the true feelings of the electorate much better if they were held on the same day as state and federal elections, yet Democrats balk because they don't want to have a level-playing field in a type of election where they have an advantage.

If you ask me, any government official who tries to use their legal authority to make it more difficult for citizens to vote is guilty of a serious crime against the American republic and should be punished accordingly. I wouldn't mind seeing them serve hard time in prison, to be perfectly honest.

I could spend an enormous amount of time on other problems with voting and what is needed to solve them. We need to replace our winner-take-all system with one based on ranked-choice voting, as has recently been successfully done in Maine. We need to abolish gerrymandering and do something about the oversized influence of special interest money. We need automatic voter registration. If I had my way, Election Day would be a national holiday, so that people would not have to choose between skipping work or skipping voting. Early voting and ease of access to voting places should be vigorously supported, not clandestinely diminished.

If democracy were a human body, the act of voting is the blood flowing through our veins. So let's vote. And let's punish those who would hinder a citizen's right to vote. And let's all work together to make voting easier and more reflective of the will of the people. In the end, after all, this is what democracy is all about.