Occupy The Voting Booth

I’m sure everyone’s heard of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ by now. One year from now, there will be another movement of occupation, and it will take place all over the country. Of course, I’m talking about ‘Occupy the Voting Booth’. The presidential election - along with many others that will have a more direct bearing on Americans’ lives - is exactly one year from today.

I’m not going to wax poetic about the president or any of his merry band of challengers, because this isn’t about them. It’s about us, the American people. Not “the American people” that politicians talk about, the American people we see everyday. The American people our children go to school with, who we talk to at the store…those people. The 99 percent, of sorts.

I say “of sorts” because far less than 99% of us voted in the 2008 presidential election, and of course the percentage of us who voted for the president is even lower than that. Included in that lower percentage, though, is the bunch of people who occupied the voting booth for the first time. Whatever their reasons were (and however I may feel about those reasons), their occupation of the booth helped create a changing moment in world history.

It also helped spur another movement: that of conservatives to “take the country back”. Leaving race out of it as much as possible, I’m going to focus on something else. Most pundits will have you believe that the country has been center-right for at least the last fifty years and definitely for the last thirty. I don’t believe that (I would say center-left until Reagan), but the fact is that President Obama’s election gave the country a shift to the left unseen since the 60s and 70s (the fact that he hasn’t governed as such has been one of his biggest problems).

Of course, people on the right hated that…and on cue, the Tea Party arrived as Republicans raced and ran over each other to get further to the right. The right’s most visible sign of success came in the 2010 midterm elections, as most everyone knows. What everyone may not know is that the right won a lot of those elections - cough, Rick Scott - because a lot of people who voted in 2008 left the voting booths vacant two years later. Turnout is usually lower in midterm elections anyway, but the effect was more marked because of the uptick in the 2008 elections.

Speaking of turnout, what did many of these newly-infused GOP legislators and executives start doing when they got into office? They started with the disenfranchisement efforts (redistricting gets to this point too, but not as much). There are, IIRC, 12 states taking up measures to suppress voter registration efforts. They call it “protecting the integrity” of the vote when it’s really more like protecting the homogeneity of the vote. Some states are even going so far as to draw up legislation to split up their electoral votes. Note where these efforts are taking place. I’ll give you a hint if needed: look for blue states with red leaders.

So how do we get past this effort to stop us from occupying the voting booths? Easily, if we start now. We have to plan and make our efforts earlier. We have to inspire people to register themselves to vote - not only to avoid the fines, but to also (and more importantly) foster a feeling of civic duty amongst our not-quite-99-percent that this stuff is important. We need to make sure that the not-quite-99-percent knows that state and local elections are important as well, even though most local districts are drawn up to guarantee seats by the time the general election comes around. We have to occupy their minds so they can occupy the booths.

One of the most basic ideas in statistics is that of the sample size. A larger sample size usually makes measurements more valid. If only half of us vote - and that number is much lower in non-presidential election years - then how representative is our democracy? It already leans toward the white, male, older, more educated, and higher-salaried segments of the general populace (a large reason I disagree with the center/right idea, as I mentioned above). There are a lot of minorities, women, younger, less educated, and definitely a lot of poor people out there. If these people occupy the voting booths, they not only give themselves and added sense of purpose: they also give their government an added meaning.