Why aren't we voting?
Last Tuesday, in Pillsbury, North Dakota, an election was held and nobody came. Nobody. Not even the people running for office.
Mayor Darrel Brudevold later told Associated Press reporters he’d meant to vote, but got busy tending crops. His wife too said she’d become preoccupied with work and forgotten.
The city has now turned to state election officials to ask what to do next.
To be fair, the small farming community only has about 25 residents. Furthermore, each must drive 12 miles to the closest precinct, and all the candidates were running unopposed.
Nevertheless, one must take serious pause when an entire town fails this basic civic duty.
Why are people not voting? Some voters will say they make the conscious decision because they are turned off, either by lackluster candidates or a faulty system.
Others will claim to not be educated enough about the issues or that they don’t want to make ill-informed choices. Or there are those who say, “It doesn’t matter who I vote for, nothing will change.”
There is no end to the millions of reasons, excuses and justifications people find not to vote. In fact, in the last 63 years, the average national turnout has hovered around 48.3 percent.
In a country where women went on hunger strikes for the privilege and “qualification tests” were used to weed out African American voters, it seems like sort of a slap in the face.
In other parts of the world, more people take part in their systems of government. Italy, for example, leads in turnout rates with a 92.5 percent average since 1945. Iceland, Belguim, New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden also have high percentages.
And it is not only western countries that beat the U.S.: Somalia ranks number seven with 87.1 percent, Uzbekistan has 86.2 percent, and Kuwait has 79.6 percent. Other nations above the curve include Ethiopia, China, and Venezuela.
Even in Uganda, where reports regularly surface of parliamentary opposition members being beaten bloody and where the election process is widely considered one of the most corrupt in the world, people still turn out in scores five notches higher than the United States.
Here in Klickitat County, about 60 percent of registered voters participated in this year’s presidential primary, which isn’t bad. (At the statewide level, it was only 42 percent.)
Still, where are the remaining 40 percent?
If people in Uganda feel there is a reason to hope for better things and in fact exercise that faith each year, despite quite reasonable cause to question it - why is it we don’t?
Our ancestors fought hard for the right to vote in free elections and soldiers today fight hard to defend it.
As the presidential primary season comes to a close and we look towards November, let’s show them the honor of saying thank you. Let’s turn out in overwhelming numbers and leave Italian victories to the soccer field.
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