North Star Writers Group

All U.S. citizens have a duty the first Tuesday in November. That duty is to vote. Voting is both a privilege and a responsibility of citizenship. Just like paying taxes, serving on juries and not exceeding the speed limit or driving while intoxicated.

There are precious few legitimate excuses for not voting. On Election Day, polls are open both before and after office hours. My state, Texas, offers absentee ballots and advance voting during the two weeks prior to any election. There is enough time somewhere in all that to cast a ballot.

There are some obstacles to voting regularly. Any business caught making it difficult, if not impossible, for eligible employees to vote should face serious consequences, not just a wrist slap. Likewise, state and local officials are charged with doing everything possible to register citizens to vote and then to help them accomplish the act of casting a ballot. Those who are hindering or manipulating these efforts should be tossed out of office and possibly prosecuted for malfeasance, if not criminal fraud. All state and county voting officials should hold office without party affiliation to enhance their credibility. Electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering and should be required to provide a paper ballot that voters review and certify as an accurate record of their votes.

Yes, reviewing candidates and incumbents takes time and some candlepower. All sorts of helpful resources are readily available, however. The League of Women Voters (www.lwv.org) has chapters in every state that regularly glean candidates’ positions on issues and make them available to anyone for the asking. Local newspapers always make recommendations and endorsements. These are good if only to clarify which candidates to avoid, depending on readers’ views of the paper’s editorial politics.

As some are always ready to remind us, freedom isn’t truly free. Taking time to vote is a very small price to pay for making our republic work. Our soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots served, bled and died to preserve our right to vote. The very least we can do in return is exercise that right when it comes time to do so.

Voting in every election is the essence of patriotic citizenship. Patriotism does not consist of flag-waving or cheering veterans on parade. These are cheap and all too often empty acts, especially when the flowery phrases are followed by attempts to cut veterans’ benefits or lack of adequate protective equipment in a battle zone.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I didn’t fly an American flag. I didn‘t join a candlelight vigil, although in my heart I lit a candle for everyone who died, and those lights still glow half a decade later, my sorrow still sharp and painful.

But there is one civic duty I have performed for more than three decades, almost without fail. Since the presidential election of 1972, I have voted in elections, local, state and national. The only voting day I recall missing was back in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia broke up over the skies of my state. In my shock and grief, I forgot that there was a city election that day.

As a woman, I vote not only because it is my civic responsibility and to honor the sacrifices of our fighting forces. I vote in full awareness of my foremothers’ 72-year struggle to win the right for women to vote. The conservatives of their day excoriated suffragists as home-wreckers and branded them as traitors during World War I for demanding the same rights at home as the United States supposedly was defending abroad. Undaunted, they pressed their case and eventually prevailed. Both of my grandmothers were in their twenties when women won the right to vote.

I don’t buy the argument that there is little difference between the political parties. On issues like Social Security, the environment and the minimum wage there are huge differences. There might even be greater differences between Democrats and Republicans if more eligible voters went to the polls on a regular basis. The one thing the denizens of Foggy Bottom fear more than anything else is an informed citizenry exercising the right to supervise them and kick them out of office. They are, after all, only temporary help.

With the latest sex scandal, it’s more tempting than ever to write off Congress as a cesspool of corruption. Why bother to vote if nothing ever changes? When we don’t vote, we give a free pass to those with whom we may disagree to make or break laws that affect all of us, with very real and often devastating consequences (think Iraq war). Is that what we want?

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