Nothing Personal

If you’ve made phone calls or knocked on doors for a candidate, you’ve heard it: “I’ll be voting, but I’m not going to talk about it with you. That’s a personal matter.”

Bullshit.

As you read this, tens of millions of people are meeting in schools, churches and community centers to pick the next president of the United States. Their decision will affect 280 million Americans and billions of people around the world. Nothing could be more public.

While voters angrily turn campaign volunteers away from their doors, polls show many Americans still make their decision with fairly ridiculous misconceptions. According to a recent poll of Bush supporters, a majority believes the president would not have gone to war if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush has never said that; in fact, he has frequently said exactly the opposite. Clearly voters don’t have too much information about the candidates. Voters wouldn’t buy a car knowing as little as they know about politics.

I think people feel comfortable voting with so little information because they think of their decision to vote (or not vote) as a private matter. Nobody has a right to judge them for their decision. After all, this is a democracy.

It’s time to stop letting Americans off the hook. Too often, groups that value civic participation try to sell voting like they would sell car insurance. They act as if voting is a simple transaction: a few minutes of your time for a small chunk of influence. The Institute of Politics informs students that if they don’t vote, they have no voice. But what if students don’t want a voice? Clearly the H-Vote captains who give up their meals to register voters think that voter nonparticipation is bad for the country, not just for the individuals who don’t vote. Why don’t they say so?

We should be telling people that they have an obligation to participate in the political process. They don’t just have to vote, they have to educate themselves about the candidates and the process. Voters shouldn’t feel like they have a right not to discuss politics, like they have a right to preserve their opinions from opposing evidence and alternative points of view. Every American who votes for George W. Bush because they think there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq owes an apology to nearly 1100 dead servicemen and women, not to mention 10,000 Iraqi civilians. Every American who votes for him because they believe he supports adding labor and environmental protections to trade agreements—nearly three-quarters of Bush’s supporters think he does—owes an apology to every American who has lost his or her job to a country that crushes unions or lowers costs by dumping their waste in the water supply. I’m not asking that every voter get a Ph.D. in public policy, but on issues of life and death, issues that voters say are the most important, we should at least know the basics.

And it’s not like nobody’s trying to get the information out there. Campaigns and partisan groups may have a bias, but if voters listen to everybody and are willing to engage in substantive discussions, they should at least be able to figure out the outlines of the candidates’ positions. If a volunteer shows up at your door, you have been given an opportunity to get beyond sound bites, to actually have a discussion with a representative of somebody who might just be the next president. Those who fail to take advantage of those opportunities leave candidates with no choice but to rely on slick ads and empty rhetoric. Money dominates politics because money buys ads, and ads work. If voters won’t listen to volunteers, candidates must rely on the most expensive—and most disgusting—medium out there. This means they must appeal to those who can write the big checks, and they’re free to ignore everybody else. Lazy voters made attack ads the only effective form of political mobilization, and only an active electorate will ever get rid of them.

I’m sitting three days before the general election at an old computer in the Manchester headquarters of America Coming Together (ACT). Today, ACT-New Hampshire had more than 1,000 volunteers walking the streets, urging New Hampshire residents to vote. An exhausted camaraderie permeates the room. The crowd, mostly young people who have traveled from all over the East coast, feel they owe it to everybody else here to do their best. They don’t think it’s their right to opt out of the process. The stakes are too high, for everybody. Voters who slam the door on these volunteers are rejecting democracy, and that is not a personal matter.

By most accounts, more people will vote in this election than have ever voted before. It’s a great start. But before our work is done, we need to be able to say that we, as a nation, truly take elections seriously. Americans have an obligation, not just a right, to take elections seriously. They owe it to their fellow citizens and the rest of the world. It’s nothing personal. It’s democracy.

Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.