Voting and Elections

It is now October, 2022, and I haven’t written for quite some time. Last time I wrote was back in 2020 when I gave some of the reasons why I would not vote for Donald Trump. Well, since then we have had the troubled times of accusations that the election was stolen and many people even today still believe that the election wasn’t legit. I am not part of that group, but that really isn’t the focus of today’s “taking a stand.” Instead what I want to write about is voting and elections.

My vantage point is that we should encourage all citizens to vote, and we should do everything we can to facilitate that process. Yesterday I voted, and as I generally do, and I voted early. The “official” voting day is Nov 8. It only makes sense to me that I go to the polling place when it is convenient for me and when the lines will be shorter. And indeed, I was in and out of the polling place in less than 15 minutes. The statistics about the number of people who do vote is dismal. Here in Texas it is not uncommon that in primary elections only around 20% of the people vote.

So here’s what I find disturbing. Ever since the 2020 election, there has been tons of talk about how to control the number of fake votes. We hear talk of voter fraud, dead people voting, ex-felons voting, double voting, etc. By all accounts, the percent of voter fraud is actually super low. What I don’t hear from any politicians in an emphasis and encouragement to vote. All I hear from politicians is a rant and rage about voter fraud. Shouldn’t the emphasis really be on encouraging more people to vote? Shouldn’t the push be to increase the percent of voters? Shouldn’t the importance of voting be first on our agenda? All this focus on voter fraud removes us from the bigger issue of voter apathy.

Of course, what is really going on is that politicians really only want you to vote if you vote for them. It’s an ironic twist that rather than encourage everyone to vote, the focus is own how to make it more difficult for people to vote when one suspects that the citizen may vote for someone else. It’s disingenuous

I sincerely doubt that anyone will decide to vote because of a reminder in this post. The most I can hope for is that next time someone moans about voter fraud and promotes all the legislation to better control voting, hopefully that will be coupled with a plea to ask everyone to vote.