Not voting?

If you’ve lived in a cave in the Afghanistan mountains for the last eight years, you might be forgiven for not knowing we have an election coming up next Tuesday. Early voting is already underway, of course, but most people in our neck of the woods wait to vote in person so Nov. 5 is a big day for them.

Nevertheless, you have plenty of options for making sure you vote. Yet, we have recently run into several adults (mostly in their 20s) who tell us they aren’t planning to vote or, even more surprising, they have never voted. According to recent news stories, as many as 90 million voting-age Americans didn’t vote in the last presidential election. According to the experts who track such things, 158,429,631 people voted in the 2020 general election – the highest voter turnout in the last 100 years at 66.8%. But the U.S. Census Bureau said 252,274,000 people of voting age lived in the country. I’ll do the math for you - 93.844 million people didn’t vote. Not that all of them could vote. Some were incarcerated, some had personal or health issues keeping them from the polls and some were simply ineligible to mark a ballot.

So, with raised eyebrows, we inquired of these 20-30 year olds who never voted why. The answer was repeated among all of them. “It doesn’t matter,” they said, with some adding that in Wyoming it’s a foregone conclusion – and in this election with Trump on the ballot once again why bother.

It seems many of those who didn’t vote also didn’t pay attention to political news, or political noise as one person said.

That means they missed out on having their voice heard on a variety of other issues and, in some races, on the candidates for local offices. In this election, we have two property tax-related questions. One is whether to continue the senior services district tax which funds capital improvements at both senior centers and several senior housing complexes in both Douglas and Glenrock.

The other is a constitutional amendment that would allow the legislature to set the tax rate for homes differently than commercial, ag or industrial rates. Depending on whether you trust the legislature to lower your home tax rate or believe they will raise them because they can, it is too important an issue to leave it up to someone else.

Plus, the ballot this year includes school board candidates for both districts. Few boards touch our lives and those of our children more than the local school trustees. In Douglas, seven people are running for five slots; in Glenrock, nine folks are vying for three seats.

So while you may not think your vote for president matters, the other ballot issues will affect you, your taxes and your children. Why leave that up to the 60% of the voting-age population who make the effort. If the other 40% voted, the outcome may or may not change but it could.

Take, for instance, the special elections (we had two of them with the last one in 2019) on the rec centers for Douglas and Glenrock. Voter turnout in 2019 was a miserable 65.8%. The final vote was 1,961 against and 1,711 for – a slim difference of 250. But 1,909 registered voters never cast a ballot in the special election; and an untold number of people weren’t registered to vote at all.

Had even a few hundred more voted, the outcome may have been different. And if it hadn’t changed the result, the bigger tally against it would have been more clear.