Blog

Plan Your Vote

I’ve voted already, by mail as most New Jerseyans will do. I’m not really happy about it. Voting by mail is not the same. Twice in my life when I was working out of state. I voted absentee. I didn’t like that either. In fact, I still miss the old-fashioned individual levers for each question on the ballot.

I can’t say that registering to vote was an event for me unlike my daughter, Mariclare who registered on Mother’s Day 2000 in Washington DC during the Million Mom March. We have the pictures to prove it. When Election Day rolled around her older sister for whom it would be her first presidential vote, suggested that we walk over to the polling station as a family.

In 2018 the Georgia gubernatorial race was steeped in flim flam, formally known as voter suppression, with lines of people waiting five and six hours to cast their vote. Meanwhile for me the longest wait to vote was in 2000 as I stood on line behind my adult children. Even my Manhattan friends have never waited on such a long line. But I know I would.

It’s not the history of Susan B. Anthony and the other suffragettes, it isn’t even my nine-year-old memory watching the TV coverage of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. This year the saying is Plan your Vote but I have always done that. When the sample ballot arrives there would be a discussion of the ballot questions because by then the decision on top of the ballot was set. On Monday night the chatter at dinner would be I’m going to vote before work, at lunch or after work. Once your ballot was cast it was time to report back, with the your voter number in the district. In the age of cell phone, selfies are encouraged, sporting your ‘I Voted” sticker. My polling place never gave out stickers, what a bummer!

I regret that saying all of this out loud makes it sound trivial but it isn’t to me. I had the privilege years ago of pulling the lever in a New Jersey Congressional race for a high school friend. She was a kind upperclassmen I met when I joined the school newspaper. I consider her my first mentor. Even in high school I knew that I someday I would go into a voting booth and reach for the lever with her name on it. It happened! I stood behind that curtain and I took a minute to relish this dream come true. She didn’t win that race but I felt the weight of the history of our democracy in that solitary moment behind the curtain in the voting booth.

I don’t understand the non-voter or should I say non-voters.
There are 100 million non-voters! Why?

In 2016, I was excited to cast my vote. On Election Day dressed in my pants suit and scarf a colleague told me that she wasn’t going to be bullied into voting. She continued a tirade of voting wasn’t going to do anything for her and it would be just another thing sucking time out of her day. It was the end of our conversation because I didn’t even know what she meant by ‘bullied into voting’ meant.

Apparently, no one has a good grip on the non voter according to the Knight Foundation funded survey, The 100 Million Project. Conservative newspaper publisher Jack Knight left the money in his estate for the foundation. Non-voters lean both Democratic and Republican and across all demographics.
Since the most likely high school class for a student to fail isn’t math, it’s history. Is this a factor? It’s often been said that high school shapes a person’s entire life. Many of these people have never connected to this aspect of the political process. The study suggests that nonvoters are intentionally uninformed. In the day and age of Cable TV News, Facebook and Twitter, I find that hard to fathom.

The study illustrated several contributing behaviors such as many non voters considered every interaction with a governmental agency as problematic. This is in the spirit of getting caught in a long line at the motor vehicle office to discover that you don’t have the correct paperwork. Necessitating trip to motor vehicle and another long line.
Agreed! It’s a real hassle. But your car still needs license plates.

My personal theory involves the part of our personalities that doesn’t like to be wrong. This spawns the attitude of I don’t like either of the candidates. Most of the voting age group has experienced standardized testing. Those school skills can be applied. Choose either A or B. On the standardized test no answer is definitely wrong. The non-voter feels the outcome of any election is the same.

Perhaps, these non-voters have not reached a true adulting stage of life. I turned 18 in 1972 in time for the first presidential election after the passage of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution that changed the voting age from 21 to 18. It was my first time to cast a vote and I knew I was casting my first vote for the loser of that race. In fact, George McGovern lost by a landslide. For a nanosecond I wanted to be on the winning team. I knew better. I knew winning was not the important action for my vote. It was about my standards, my values.

For 2020, I’ve made my decision based on my standards and values. Part of my intrinsic make-up is that I would prefer that everyone vote. I don’t want is for the next four years for be decided by 100 million people who decide to stay home.

Plan Your Vote. And then do it.