In an impressive demonstration of electoral spirit and civic responsibility, approximately 85 percent of Naperville’s registered voters answered the challenge of our first nine-member municipal election by… staying home.
So, predictably, the election was more about name recognition than it was about issues, of which there were plenty. The candidates who didn’t get elected last Tuesday all received just about the same number of votes, which is what you see when people are voting more or less randomly for the names they don’t recognize.
Since our house is 10 feet inside Naperville township, we vote at the Municipal Center, which is actually a great place to vote if you don’t fall down the concrete stairs in front, which I did one election day. I was such a bloody mess when I voted that I thought one of the judges might faint.
This year I was expecting to see a great rush of activity because there has hardly been a more significant election than this one. So it was a little disappointing, when we walked in, to see the judges napping and playing mumbly peg. No, just kidding, they were working very professionally, but there was only one other voter in the room. At about 3 p.m. my ballot was the 167th one through the optical reader.
That’s kind of pathetic, and it’s hard to understand. The usual reasons people give for low turnout don’t seem to apply here. Eighty-five percent of our population isn’t poor, immigrant, minority, or disadvantaged. They all have some kind of transportation to the polls, and although it’s incredibly stupid that we still vote on a workday, that doesn’t seem to be the problem either. People apparently just don’t give a flip.
Recently, President Obama publicly wondered what would happen if we had mandatory voting as Argentina, Costa Rice, and Australia do. I have cousins in Brisbane, and apparently those who don’t vote get a letter asking them why not. Almost any excuse will do, and those who are so dense that they can’t come up with one get fined only $20. But even that lax system somehow gets between 80 and 90 percent of the people to the polls. My cousins, by the way, always vote.
But immediately after the president’s statement the papers were full of columns defending the people’s right not to vote. Many of these, of course, were written by conservatives, who understand that most of the people who don’t vote are liberal, which is why they pass laws making it harder to vote.
That’s not the case in conservative, red meat Naperville, of course, where liberals are almost an endangered species, but they do have a point. Liberty shouldn’t be qualified. Except for serving on juries, which must be representative of the population, and buying insurance, so you don’t force others to pay for your mistakes, Americans do indeed have a right to be disengaged, misinformed, uninformed, and whatever they want to be.
So while in an ideal world we should probably have strict caps on campaign funds, an allotment of free television time for every candidate, make election day a holiday, and put the campaigns under oath for the final two months so we can prosecute people who create political advertisements that lie, it’s never going to happen.
However, voting is actually the only thing most people do to participate in local government. What if we said that, if you didn’t vote, if you refuse to participate, then you couldn’t participate in any local government activity until the next election? You couldn’t speak before the city council, contact a councilman, attend functions in the Municipal Center, get permits, receive help from city staff, or any number of other things. You don’t want to participate in your government? Fine. It’s your choice.
Bill Mego is a freelance writer.