Vote! Vote! Vote!

If you will be eighteen by November 5, 2019, you should be registered to vote, and you should vote. You should not hesitate to encourage friends and family to vote. Regularly during “voting season,” the media ask us to vote. We’ve been told repeatedly how important our votes are. I am adding my voice to the get-out-to-vote campaign.

In 2016, many persons did not vote for many reasons: They don’t listen to us; The polls said Hillary would win; I don’t like Hillary; I liked neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate. I think Bernie was mistreated. Fact: if we have the electoral college—we will forever, say some folks—the winner will need all the votes she or he can get in every election. My guess is that many persons who did not vote would have voted had they known the results. Not voting for one candidate—even the lesser of what you consider two evils—is a vote for the winner despite the degree of your disapproval. Every concerned citizen should know the statement, “Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states effectively decided the election: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.” The Supreme Court decision concerning the 1964 Civil Rights Bill gave states permission to change laws as they saw fit minus any oversight from the federal government. For some states, this meant voter suppression via purging the rolls, requiring photo identification, and reducing the number of polling places and times to vote. All these states are not in the South! Voter suppression took a heavy toll. Mother Jones and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study supply details of the number of persons who did not vote because of suppression. Exactly how large the impact of the Russian influence on the election will be argued for years. However, gerrymandering might have been the largest culprit in the election.

Apart from the variety of rules on provisional votes, each vote counts. The Internet has countless articles pointing out the closeness of the contest between Clinton and Trump. Trump is the fifth president who lost the popular vote. If we do not vote, we should not be surprised if the same acts cause the same problems for this election and then the 2020 election.

Any time we can vote, each of us should vow to be counted in the number of persons voted!

~Georgia McDade