Letters from the Election Office | Part III

If reasonable people don’t offer to serve then those who do serve might not be reasonable.

Voting Down Ballot

Every day we hear about another state legislature passing another crazed, extremist bill. Partisan gerrymandering and super majorities have allowed a handful of people to pass laws that the majority of the populace don’t want while not acting on issues the majority do want.

If I asked each of you to name your state representative or state senator, I’d guess less than 10% could do so. I can’t and I’m actively involved. They’re nearly invisible. Yet these folks are our state governments. They are actively passing legislation that impacts our daily lives, the lives of our children and our grandchildren.

They are banning books, defunding libraries, changing election law, limiting women, minority and voting rights. The list gets longer and crazier every day.

These legislators are also your neighbors. Their districts are relatively small. Twenty thousand votes might be the total cast in a state house race, and for those districts that aren’t heavily gerrymandered, as little as a few hundred votes can change the outcome. Three thousand votes might change the balance of power in the legislature. It could take away a single party’s super majority or switch parties in control.

Election ballots are organized from federal to statewide to district and then to local. Most of us vote in the presidential race, the senate and congress. We’ll even vote for statewide races like governor and secretary of state. Unless you happen to know someone farther down the ballot, i.e., a school board candidate, we tend to lose interest or simply don’t know enough about the candidates to know for whom to vote when we get toward the end.

That’s what we need to change. That’s how we make a change. The big question is how? How can I leverage my one vote to get the 1500-2000 votes needed to change the outcome of an election?

• Start by doing your research.
• Take an hour and look at the campaign websites for the candidates.
• Take a look at their social media pages.
• Make a choice and ask yourself why you chose this candidate over that one. (More on that in a minute.)
• If you talk to three friends and ask them to do the same, it adds up real fast. Let’s use six degrees of separation. When your three friends each tell three friends and this happens six times you’ve just found 2000+ votes. Thank God for calculators.

Going back to why you chose a particular candidate, it’s important to tell your friends why you made that choice and how it will impact your lives. It’s also good to explain voting down ballot. A few minutes of conversation can make a huge difference in the legislation coming out of your state capital.

Don’t be afraid to talk politics. It’s an amazing feeling when you find you’re not alone in the darkness.

An organization working on this topic is www.statesproject.org. Check them out.

Next time: Becoming part of the community

In Service,

Until the next Letter from the Election Office

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