Not Voting is Not OK

It’s easy to think that MAGA Republicans represent the worst-ever threat to our American democracy, but they do not.

They’re a threat, sure, a big threat, probably the second-most dangerous threat there is.  But they pale in comparison with another group, a vastly larger and starkly well-defined  group:  eligible people who do not vote.

I hate to sound ugly, but the plain truth is that eligible people who do not vote are leeches on society and they are destroying  our democracy.

They are leeches because they accept all the benefits that democracy gives them but they won’t even take the time once a year or so  to do their duty and vote.

And they are destroying our democracy because the only way a democracy can survive – the only way a democracy is intended to survive – is for its citizens to  pay attention to what is happening and vote.

We Americans are failing to do that, and we are failing miserably.  We are one of the least active voting people among the world’s developed countries.  Out of 35 countries surveyed by the United Nations, we rank 31^st in the percentage of eligible voters who actually vote.

Compare: In 2014, 87 percent of the voting-age population in Belgium  turned out.  In Turkey it was 84 percent.   Two years later, when Americans chose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, fewer than 60 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.  And even in 2020, when arguably the most important presidential race in decades, if not in history, pitted Joe Biden against Donald Trump, only 66 percent of us voted.

Local elections are even worse.  In Charlotte recently, a municipal election drew only about  5 (sic ) percent of eligible voters.  A recent municipal vote in young and wealthy Mount Pleasant, S.C., drew only about 10 percent.  The story is the same throughout most of the nation.

The problem is that if significant numbers of eligible voters stay away from the polls, the results become skewed in favor of those who understand the power of the vote and use it, such as land developers, power seekers and crooks.

You would think that every political party would be doing everything in their power to get people signed up to vote, and the Democratic Party is doing just that.

But Republicans are openly doing the opposite.  They are working not to enable people  to vote, but to prevent them from voting, especially if they are Black, young, or anyone else they think might vote for a Democrat.

They’re doing it openly and in many obvious ways.  Look around you.  To discourage college students from voting, Republican election officials often pull cheap tricks, like putting polls in places that are hard to reach and offer little parking, as they did recently at Appalachian State University in mountainous Boone, N.C.  Republican legislatures often cut early voting days or hours.  They limit the number of polling places, which forces voters to stand in ridiculously long lines, sometimes for five or more hours.  They do everything they can to limit mail-in votes.

But Republicans also employ larger, well-organized efforts to keep Democrat-leaning people away from the polls.  One of their most successful efforts has been to keep felons from voting.  As many as 6 million Americans of voting age can’t cast ballots today because they live in Republican-controlled states that bar anyone with a criminal record from voting, even after they have served their sentences.

Republican-controlled Florida had  perhaps the nation’s toughest felon-voting law.  It barred anyone convicted of a felony from voting for the rest of his life, and the right to vote could not be reinstated unless the governor and the state clemency board agreed.  As a result, 1.6 million Floridians, or about 9 percent of the electorate, were shut out.

Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that restored voting rights to felons who had served their sentences, but a Trump-appointed federal appeals court ruled that felons cannot vote until they have paid back all their outstanding court fines and fees.  That’s a huge hurdle since most former inmates are indigent.

Another dubious effort Republican legislatures have used in recent years  to keep people from voting is to require some form of government-approved identification.  They say it’s necessary to prevent fraud at the polls (which is rare), but it has the effect of keeping young people and Black people away from the polls because they are less likely to have such identification.  In some states the required identification costs as much as $60, and in most states where the necessary papers are free, the offices where one must go to get them are in hard-to-reach areas.

Republicans use other methods as well, but the point is that Republicans are working hard to prevent people from exercising their most sacred right, and that is tantamount to working hard to destroy our nation’s democracy. 

They are succeeding, and the proof of that is that we get, well, we get what we have: a Congress that does not represent the will of the people, a Republican-led House that is so rabidly right-wing  that it is focusing on finding some way to impeach President Biden rather than keeping the government operating and the military strong.   We have state legislatures all over the nation that are gerrymandered so severely that the minority of people are governing the majority.  In Wisconsin, basically a blue state , the GOP gerrymandering is so severe that Democrats don’t stand a chance of getting elected, no matter how many of them vote.

I just wish that Republicans  would say out loud  the elephant-in-the-room plain truth that they want to destroy our democracy and replace it with an authoritarian form of government, preferably one led by Donald Trump.  And they’ll stop at nothing to make it happen.

It’s not all doom and gloom for Democrats, though.  Just a few days ago Democrats, led by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights  Advancement Act, which the House passed in 2021 but was stopped by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.  Sewell’s measure would restore and modernize the 1965 Voting Rights Act  after the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder decision gutted it.

Also, Vice President  Kamala Harris has embarked on a month-long tour of college campuses where she is explaining to students how important it is that they vote. She told a cheering, overflow audience at the Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania  – and presumably a lot of other places as well — that voting “determines whether a person who is holding elected office is going to fight for your freedoms and rights or not.  Whether that be the freedom that you should have to just be free from attack, free from hate, free from gun violence, free from bias, free to love whom you love and be open about it, free to have access to the ballot box without people obstructing your ability to exercise your civic rights to vote, in terms of who will be the people holding elected office and leading your community.”

The political power of young people will be important in deciding the 2024 elections.  There’s always hope.