By Pat Barrett

Your vote is valuable. Vote your conscience for a better life for yourself, your family, neighbors, co-workers, and fellow citizens. I would like to discuss the history of the struggle to vote, the current apathy surrounding going to the polls, and what you can do about it.

Susan B. Anthony, the leader of the women’s suffrage movement and champion of the right to vote for women in 1920, said, “Suffrage is the pivotal right.” From 1920 to 1960, the voting block of women decreased from a 50% difference as opposed to male voters to only a 10% gap.

The 15th amendment to the Constitution passed in 1870, granting African Americans the right to vote. However, many states denied this right. At the very least, some states levied poll taxes of $2 and $3, knowing that many African-American voters of the 1870’s could not afford this tax. Many African-American citizens were beaten or killed when they tried to vote by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1963, three civil rights workers who had traveled to the South to help register African-American voters were slain. Two years too late, the Voting Rights Act passed. This prohibited discrimination based on race or language in voting.

The Help America Vote Act (Hava) passed in 2002. You will remember from the 2000 presidential election that some unwanted guys named Chad were hanging around in the polling booths in Florida. HAVA established more accurate methods of recording votes and access for those with disabilities.

Up until the 2006 primary election, blind persons could not vote privately. They could either bring a friend in to help them fill out their ballot in the polling booth, or have an election judge from each major political party read and review their ballot. My wife Trudy, who is blind, had an unfortunate experience a few years ago when she used the second method. The judge vocally criticized Trudy’s candidate choices. Not very private, was it?

Blind persons still can use the two voting methods I discussed earlier. But now, there is a third option of voting privately using the AutoMark machine.

The AutoMark takes the regular voting ballot and scans the text in the machine. After a couple of minutes, the text is vocalized through a set of headphones that the voter wears. Basic navigation keys like those of a video game help the voter move forward, backward through contests, and select candidates or preferences on constitutional amendments. After the ballot is marked and the blind voter is done, they feed it into the ballot box to be counted.

This was such a liberating experience for me! I could vote for the first time in private as other citizens did. I rode the bus, the driver commented that I voted when he saw the red sticker proclaiming that, and I told him excitedly about the freedom to vote privately for the first time. I continued that excitement in a conversation with the bank teller.

George Jean Nathan, who lived between 1882 and 1958, wrote, “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” How much more is that voter apathy true today!

Dr. Thomas E. Patterson, an African-American history professor at Howard University, brought the following sad facts to light in 2002 in his book The Vanishing Voter. From 1960 to 2000 represented the longest ebb in voter turnout in American history. Sixty-five percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the U. S. presidential election in 1960. That dropped to 51% in 2000. A little over half of the voters voted in that hotly contested election. Would it have been different in the outcome and less time-consuming if more people voted? And, an incredulous and shocking 18% voted in the Congressional elections for that same year.

Bernard K. Baruch advises, “Vote for the man or woman who promises the least: they’ll be the least disappointing.” What can you do before voting on November 4?

Ponder, pray (if you are so moved to do so), and identify the issues that are important to you. Tune into the political debates. This will inform you more on the candidates and the issues they stand for than the short, often negative political ads. Finally, turn out to vote, vote, vote!

John Quincy Adams, the 5th president of the United States counseled, “Always vote for principle, and even if you vote alone, the sweetest reflection is that your vote is never lost.”