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Stephen Gottlieb: If You Don't Show, You Don't Count

If you don’t show, you don’t count.

That’s true in many ways. If you don’t show up in the WAMC fund drive, you don’t count in its survival or in the quality of programming it can carry. And you leave the station’s underwriters less confident of what their efforts can do. Showing up matters.

If you aren’t planning to show up to vote, don’t fool yourself that it won’t matter. Or you might think that you’re sending a message. But the message received isn’t necessarily the same message you think you’re sending. The way politicians count no-shows is that you and those like don’t count. If you’re not likely to show up at the polls, politicians are not likely to spend much time worrying about your problems and how to convince you they are the good guys. They won’t spend much effort trying to help people like you and they won’t waste campaign time trying to explain to you and people like you why their policies matter or the other guys’ policies don’t.

And if the pollsters don’t think you’re going to show up at the polls, that changes what they tell us is likely to happen, and it deepens the discouragement of people like you. Politics won’t help you because not enough people like you show the pollsters and the politicians that you demand to be counted.

In other words, not showing up at the polls has consequences way beyond the election. It generates a vicious cycle. Who is going to care about your generation or your part of the country or your place in the economy if you don’t vote? Voting is the coin of the realm. It’s the currency from which politicians determine what to worry about. It’s what we have to pay to get attention. The other stuff, money, only matters if it can get votes. If your vote isn’t in play, you, your friends, family and others like you are not counted. That’s part of why voting is a civic duty. It’s not just something we do for ourselves, like buying a pair of socks. It’s something we do to set the scales of politics.

Even commentators like myself pay attention. Who’s out there that can get our message? Who’s out there that may run with our message? Who’s out there that needs to be or can be reached and persuaded?

Of course, understanding the issues matters. Many of us are convinced, for example, that Trump is playing for suckers lots of the people who are supporting him for economic reasons. We’re convinced that he’s covering his failures with pittances and throwing the benefits to others. But my point goes way beyond that because even if you make a mistake, the very fact that you got to the polls changes everything. Don’t stay home.

And when you get to the polls, don’t shrug off things that can go wrong at the polls – broken machines, difficulty getting the machines to reflect your choices, long lines to vote at too few voting machines, long distances to get to the polling places you are assigned. Make an objection. Go to a judge. Go to the reporters. Or get to one of the lawyers fighting to make our system cleaner and more democratic. You make a difference by being counted.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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