“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” Emma Goldman once said.
Strong words from a strong (and oft-quoted) woman, the philosophy of which holds a lot of weight these days on both a national and a local level. Roughly 40 percent of the eligible voting population didn’t vote in the 2004 general election. And that’s a trifle compared to the over 90 percent of the eligible voting population here at PSU that didn’t vote in the student elections last year.
And that’s a problem.
“I’d rather spend my time doing something that actually matters.” This gets said a lot. The power of voting, some say, is virtually nothing compared to the power of direct action. Which is, of course, completely true, and also, of course, a really shitty reason not to vote. At the very most, voting takes a few minutes of one’s time every six months. And in student elections, it’s as easy as logging on to Banweb.
In Oregon especially, with our vote-by-mail system, voting’s pretty much painless and is as easy as it’s going to get. And will it change the world? Doubtful. But being involved in direct action to bring about greater change can co-exist with marking up a ballot. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Some people complain that the options they have as voters are all the same, or that none of the candidates line up with their interests or goals. Nobody likes to choose between “the lesser of two evils,” as it’s commonly put.
But listen: It’s true that Kerry or Gore wouldn’t have done any better than George W. Bush at righting the major wrongs of this country, but a Democratic president would not have made it easier to overturn Roe vs. Wade, would not have increased tax cuts for the wealthy, would not have vetoed the SCHIP plan to give health insurance to low-income children, would not have dismissed global warming as non-existent, and maybe even wouldn’t have started that little thing called the Iraq War. Which, in case you avoided the Park Blocks for a couple of weeks last month, has had consequences of a dire nature.
Lots of people don’t want to be a part of the system they try to fight against. Super. But the only outcome when you don’t vote is the powers-that-be figure you just don’t care. If you’re truly that discontent with the options available to you, don’t be passive about it, be active. Turn in a blank ballot. Check all the boxes. Vote for Darth Vader as a write-in (My father votes Frank Zappa for Canadian Prime Minister every election, regardless of the fact that he is American, not to mention dead. I call it the Douglas Thiessen method).
“But I’m only one person,” a lot of people think. “My vote doesn’t count for anything. I don’t matter.”
Sure. In a vacuum, your vote will likely never decide anything. By the same token, the plastic you recycle will never single-handedly save the planet, your support of local businesses will never make the difference between their survival, or demise. And the bike you ride will never reduce the amount of greenhouse gases by any level even marginally significant.
Follow the line of reasoning that your one vote doesn’t matter, and soon nothing you do matters. But collectively, a group of people working together will make a huge difference, and to paraphrase another strong woman, Margaret Mead, it’s the only thing that ever has. And those groups of people start and end with people like us, making individual decisions as part of a greater whole.
There are people out there that count on your absent vote, they count on you not to register and not to fill out your ballot. Remember Measure 36? It proposed to define marriage in the state of Oregon as being between a man and a woman, and it passed in 2004. Might that have been different if everybody against that notion had registered and voted no?
I was doing some voter registration work a few weeks back in the Park Blocks, and a man jabbering on his cell phone took a second to turn and yell “Democracy doesn’t work!” Well, with that attitude, it definitely doesn’t. Ask to not be represented, and represented you surely will not be.
The last day to register to vote in Oregon is April 29. You can pick up a form in the ASPSU office in the ground floor of the Smith Memorial Student Union. Speaking of which, ASPSU elections themselves started April 20 and will continue until April 26. The people elected as a result will, among other things, allocate over $12 million dollars of your student fees, making decisions such as whether to lower the cost of the student bus pass or increase the lavish stipends of campus newspaper writers.
And voting in them is as simple as going to www.banweb.pdx.edu. You can do it at one of the computer kiosks in Smith while on your way to class. Take the time. Voting won’t save the world, but it will be one piece in the big puzzle of getting there.