This post has appeared four times under the title “I Care Not How. Only If.” and each appearance after the first started off with a defense of that title. The defense was basically, “Yeah, I do care how you vote but, even if you’re doing it wrong, I think you should.” This year I changed the title so I can skip the defense. Next year I hope to skip the explanation, too.

On January 30, the day of President Trump’s first State of the Union speech, NPR aired a Mara Liasson article entitled “The State Of Our Politics Is Divided, Mistrustful And Engaged“. The text of the article simplified this to “tribal” and “engaged” which I think would have been a better title. Those two words registered with me as I listened and they’ve stuck with me ever since. One’s bad and one’s good. One negative and the other positive. I’d long been painfully aware of the tribalism which pushed Liasson to note that “More than ever before voters and politicians seem to be taking sides not according to issues or principles or ideology but according to their political tribe.” I was much less aware of the increased engagement she saw but I have noted, with great hope, some since then. Some analysts, in fact, predict record voter turnout for a midterm election. Liasson ended her article with, “Whether you’re a woman or from an immigrant community running for the first time or a white working-class Trump supporter who voted for the first time two years ago, this renewed sense of civic responsibility is the first step to making the state of our politics less broken.” I like the way she thinks. I hope she’s right.

We fought a war to get this country going then gave every land owning white male above the age of twenty-one the right to vote. A little more than four score years later, we fought a war with ourselves that cleared the way for non-whites to vote. Several decades of loud, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous behavior brought the granting of that same right to non-males a half-century later, and another half century saw the voting age lowered to eighteen after a decade or so of protests and demonstrations.

Of course, putting something in a constitution does not automatically make it a practice throughout the land and I am painfully aware that resistance followed each of those changes and that efforts to make voting extremely difficult for “the other side” are ongoing today. I don’t want to ignore partisan obstructions and system flaws but neither do I want to get hung up on them. I meant my first paragraph to be a reminder that a hell of a lot of effort, property, and lives have gone into providing an opportunity to vote to a hell of a lot of people. Far too many of those opportunities go unused.

There are so many ways to slice and dice the numbers that producing a fair and accurate measure of voter turn out may not be possible. A Wikipedia article on the subject includes a table of voter turnout in a number of countries for the period 1960-1995. The United States is at the bottom. The numbers are more than twenty years old and open to interpretation so maybe we’re doing better now or maybe we shouldn’t have been dead last even then. But even if you want to think we are better than that, being anywhere near the bottom of the list and having something in the vicinity of 50% turnout is embarrassing… and frightening.

In the original title I claimed to not care how anyone votes. That was never entirely true, of course. I have my favorite candidates and issues. I’ll be disappointed in anyone who votes differently than I do but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be in anyone who doesn’t vote at all. I’m reminded of parents working on getting their kids to clean their plates with lines like, “There are hungry children in China who would love to have your green beans.” I’m not sure what the demand for leftover beans is in Beijing these days but I’m pretty sure some folks there would like to have our access to ballots and voting booths.