Voters must exercise their ultimate right

PACKET EDITORIAL, Nov. 8

By: Packet Editorial
   Over the past couple of weeks, we have used this space to offer our endorsements — some enthusiastic, others tepid — to candidates for various state and local offices on the ballot in this year’s election.
   But today, Election Day, we offer our wholehearted endorsement not to a candidate but to a cause — exercising the right vote.
   The importance of participating in the electoral process has been recognized since the earliest days of democracy itself. As Plato observed some 2,400 years ago, "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered this updated version in the 19th century: "Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good; ‘Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm."
   More recent observers have framed the issue more bluntly. "People who don’t vote," noted Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, "have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests." Or, as the late critic and editor George Jean Nathan put it, "Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote."
   Yet every election, it seems, sets a new record for voter apathy. The 1993 New Jersey gubernatorial election drew 65 percent of registered voters to the polls. Four years later, the turnout plummeted to 55.6 percent. And in 2001, only 49 percent of registered voters bothered to vote — the first gubernatorial election in the state’s history that drew fewer than half of the registered voters.
   Part of the reason for this unfortunate trend is that, increasingly, the candidates give us less and less reason to vote for them. The decidedly negative tone in this year’s race for governor has, like many other races in recent years, soured large numbers of would-be voters on both candidates. When the prevailing mood can best be described as "a plague on both your houses," people tend to vote with their feet — not even bothering to show up at the ballot box on Election Day.
   And the hired-gun consultants who run campaigns these days seem to like it that way. The smaller the turnout, the more they can focus their energies and resources on energizing the constituencies they know will vote for their candidate — and not worry about the great unwashed masses out there who won’t throw a monkey wrench into their strategy by, God forbid, voting. More than one high-paid consultant has been heard to proffer the now-conventional wisdom that he doesn’t care if only three people vote — as long as two of them vote for his candidate.
   Civic-minded citizens can’t let this sort of cynicism deter them from exercising one of their most cherished constitutional rights. For one thing, even if neither of the gubernatorial candidates inspires confidence, they take decidedly different policy positions on a number of key issues — property-tax reform, the Transportation Trust Fund, gun control, economic development, land-use planning, stem-cell research — that are important to the future of the state and should be important to voters. For another, the gubernatorial candidates are only the top of the ticket; there are numerous local and county offices on the ballot as well, and the results of these elections may have more direct and immediate impact on residents of cities and towns in this home-rule state than who gets to live in Drumthwacket next January.
   Ultimately, there is one overriding reason for people to vote. In a representative democracy, it is the ultimate exercise of power — a reminder to all elected officials at all levels of government that they serve at our pleasure. If we exercise this power, our duly elected government will provide us with the services we demand. If we don’t, we will, quite simply, get the kind of government we deserve.