The Greenfield Daily Reporter
Perhaps, if early reports hold true, Hancock County is on its way to a strong turnout for this important election, which wraps up on Tuesday. According to reporting this week by the Daily Reporter’s Ben Middelkamp, turnout so far at early-voting places is well over double the 2014 turnout.
Even so, it’s likely that only about half of registered voters in Hancock County will vote in this election by the time all the votes are counted Tuesday night.
That’s too bad, because voting is our purest expression of democracy. With all the rhetoric these days about the decline of democracy, casting a vote somehow feels like a bulwark against the pessimism of the era. It’s the voice of the people finally rising and cutting through the horrible hyperbole of incessant TV ads. It’s an affirmation of confidence in local candidates who will be the custodians of our sheriff’s department, our courts and our county offices for the next four years.
And yet, we tend to take voting for granted. One recent study concluded that in 2014, the top reason people cited for not voting was that they were “too busy.” Even during elections with the most compelling races — and last spring’s Republican primary offered upwards of a dozen of them here — people still don’t turn out to vote in great numbers. The most compelling race on the ballot, for sheriff, attracted a total of 11,489 votes countywide. Even accounting for die-hard Democrats who would not likely vote in a GOP primary, that’s not even a quarter of registered voters here.
And remember, the biggest bloc of voters in the 2016 presidential race were those who didn’t vote. According to the U.S. Election Project, turnout in presidential elections has not exceeded 65 percent since 1948. (In Hancock County, we have topped 70 percent, but that has been rare.)
We don’t always make it easy. Registration is not convenient. Holding elections on Tuesdays — even with the addition of early voting — means people have to juggle work and school schedules with stopping at a polling place. Tuesday voting might have been convenient for 19th century farmers who needed extra time to travel by horseback to the polls. It’s a pain now.
Campaigns also are so long — the 2016 presidential campaign lasted almost 600 days, for example — that voters are exhausted by the time it’s finally their turn to weigh in.
But perhaps the real issue is this: We have forgotten how good we have it. Consider this: In Afghanistan in October, nearly 4 million people — or half the voting-age population — braved 164 attacks throughout the country by the Taliban to cast ballots in a parliamentary election. In the first day of voting in the country’s first election since 2014, 176 people were killed, including 18 near polling places in Kabul, the capital, according to CNN and the U.S. Institute for Peace.
Defiant voters lined up for blocks at some polling places.
And so, a nation thirsting for democracy risks death to attain it. Here at home, we’re too busy.
That’s worth thinking about as you consider heading to the polls Tuesday. Please vote.
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