Did you vote in 2022?
No?
WHY NOT?!?
There were lots of opportunities to vote this year - all before the election coming up on November 8th:
· March 1, 2022: Joint Primary election (both Democrat and Republican)
· May 7, 2022: Constitutional Amendments and Joint Local Elections
· May 24, 2022: Joint Primary Runoff
· June 18, 2022: Joint Runoff
Sadly, if you didn’t vote, you had lots of company. These are the official totals for voter turnout, listed as percent of registered voters in Dallas County:
Wow. Out of 216,000 voters in the Dallas College electoral district, only 9,034 voted in the runoff for trustee of Dallas College. The winner got 2,328 votes more than the loser.
The vote margin is even smaller if you look at some other individual races. For instance, a difference of 85 votes determined who would sit on the Irving city council.
There were precincts where as few as three voters showed up on election day for the Republican primary. (A precinct typically has 1,000-3,000 registered voters.) See, if you showed up to vote Republican, you could have made the poll workers very happy. Plus, you could have had an outsized impact on the result.
The race that historically was the big attention-getter, though, was the 2000 presidential race of Bush vs. Gore. The result hung on the outcome of a single state – Florida – that was using punch cards (remember “hanging chads”?). Winning Florida would yield 271 electoral votes, one more than was needed to win the election, for the successful candidate. When the Supreme Court called for an end to the recount, Bush was ahead by 300 votes out of nearly 6 million cast in Florida, or around 0.005%. Total votes cast nationally came to just under 105 million, yet those 300 votes made all the difference. (That’s less than 0.0003%.}
We’ve heard lots of arguments about why people don’t vote:
· I forgot.
· I didn’t know what was on the ballot.
· I didn’t like any of the candidates.
· I didn’t know anything about the candidates.
· I didn’t know where to vote.
· I had to work on election day.
· My vote doesn’t matter. (Oh, yeah? Tell that to the candidate who lost by 85 votes.)
One translation for all of these excuses is: I didn't care enough to vote.
In this era of extreme partisanship, of climate change and the life-threatening weather that goes with it, and the recent Texas legislation on voter rights, women's rights and gun rights, and all the other things that you care about, it’s really important to vote.
Your future, and the future of your loved ones, depends on it. Depending on others to vote the way you would wish can be catastrophic. What if they decide to stay home, too?
Future blogs will deal with all the information you need to be an informed voter. Watch for them!
Note: The data above were taken from the Dallas County Elections web site. The total number of registered voters depends on where the electoral boundaries are for each particular jurisdiction. If the boundary crosses over into other counties, the comparison value reported here is only the portion in Dallas County.