The way I look at it, voting isn’t just a right. It is a duty.
Presidents, senators, congressman/women, mayors, city councilors … they are not appointed positions. We elected these people. If something happens where an elected official cannot fulfill a term, and one is appointed, there is an election at the earliest opportunity to fill the position legally (unless a Constitutional chain of succession is followed).
That’s pretty much all the Constitution dictates — and all it guarantees. It says nothing about any assurances that one of the two candidates in a final runoff is likable, or whether either, by some happy miracle, mirrors your own political viewpoints.
In fact, more often than not, both candidates have gaping holes in their political DNA to the point where, if you dwell only on those, you’d never vote at all.
The 2016 election immediately comes to mind. If I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times: Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump was popular among the voting public, so either you held your nose and voted for one or the other, or you stayed home on election day.
I am incapable of staying home on election day. But I was also faced with the same dilemma. I liked neither Clinton nor Trump, which meant I had to hold my nose.
In my case, I didn’t have to hold it all that forcefully. Despite my misgivings, Clinton seemed to be the far better option, at least for me.
During the Vietnam era, the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. Beyond the emotional rhetoric, setting a minimum voting age supposes that regardless of what it is, we are mature enough at that age to understand the civic responsibility of voting, the principles behind it, and the foibles inherent in any person. All we are asked to do is to make an informed decision based on whatever criteria we choose.
I can think of few times in my life where my candidate at the beginning of the primary season ended up not even winning the nomination, let alone the election. There were too many Ed Muskies, Mo Udalls, Paul Tsongases, Howard Bakers and John Andersons in my life. None of these people were still around in November, and most of them were gone by Labor Day. I’ve almost always had to regroup and vote for someone I’d not supported all through the primary season. And contrary to what you might think, it hasn’t always been straight Democrat, either.
So when I began hearing, after it became obvious that Bernie Sanders was not going to win the 2016 nomination, that his supporters were going to pitch a fit and stay home in November, I tried, in a few cases, to talk people out of it. Vote anyway, I said. Vote against Trump if that’s your only motivation. Who cares what it is. Just go and take part in this privilege/duty that people throughout our history have died to protect.
I’d love to believe in the candidate for whom I vote, but it doesn’t always happen. Very often, I have to talk myself into voting for someone because it just doesn’t feel right to fill in the square next to a name I basically dislike.
But I do it. And I’d urge anyone else in a similar predicament to do the same thing if it comes down to that.
And to all you sanctimonious, smug people who decided to make a larger point at the expense of the 2016 presidential election, I can only ask — as we’re set for one of the nastiest political fights any of us have seen in our lifetimes — how do you feel about that now?
