LAST Summer I rushed home from work to in order to vote in the Democratic primary. It was a little after four o'clock, and I was the 32nd person to vote in the precinct. Surely I was not one of only thirty-two people to care about who Virginia's next U.S. Senator would be.
It is no new phenomenon that the United States has embarrassingly low voter turnout. According to the PBS News Hour Web site, our country holds the honorable distinction of having the lowest average voter turnout among mature democracies. Somebody open the André.
The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate has found that over the last three decades, Americans grew increasingly out of touch with the political arena. Not surprisingly, the Committee found that most people today follow the news much less than earlier generations and thus do not feel connected to the political scene enough to vote once election season comes around.
The political culture here at the University mirrors the apathy plaguing the rest of the nation. Even at the University, where students presumably understand the importance of politics, nowhere near a majority of the student body votes in student government elections. In the spring 2006 University elections, only 28 percent of the entire student body voted. Even Baghdad boasts a higher turnout rate. Maybe students should start usingpurple ink to mark who has voted and who hasn't -- just to shame the clean-handed.
Interestingly, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the youth turnout in the 2006 national midterm elections increased by 2 million compared to the turnout in the 2002 midterm elections. Apparently national politics is much more salient to University students than their student government elections. Both at the University and in the country at large, the danger to the democratic system arises when people not only refuse to cast themselves as political, but refuse to cast a vote at all.
Yes, politics is dirty. It's ugly. It cheapens national discourse into five second sound bites. Even at the University, students get so turned off by endless pontification and campaigning that consists of little more than vacuous buzzwords. Whether it's preserving "the community of trust" or "curriculum internationalization," normal students eventually stop caring about the single sanction or updating the curriculum. More than anything, they just want the chalking to stop.
Inevitably, it seems, elections turn into a clash of personalities rather than a battle of ideas, on the national level as well as at the University. If we want politicians to talk about real issues, the responsibility lies with the citizenry or student body to hold them to it. Surely human interest stories like Senator Hillary Clinton's relationship with Bubba or Obama's commitment to quit smoking humanize these political titans; at the same time, this shouldn't require a complete sacrifice of substance in political discourse.
Despite all this, the electorate has the duty to pay attention to politics if they ever want to see politics change their lives for the better, rather than just provide a somewhat annoying, somewhat amusing distraction for a few months a year.
Athenian general Pericles remarks in his great Funeral Oration, "We do not say that a man who takes no interest is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." Voter apathy is antithetical to everything this nation -- and our University -- stands for. Students here pride themselves on our mantra of self-governance, but it looks like only 28 percent actually follow through in practice.
Even after not voting, plenty of University students complain about how Student Council does nothing, or how Honor doesn't represent their beliefs. But if students don't care enough to vote, student representatives certainly won't feel compelled to care about their interests, either. If students actively engaged the political process and held our student representatives accountable, we finally might get those blue book dispensers outside of classrooms that we've been promised so many times, among other things.
So, my fellow students, get in the game. After all, the Student Council president and Honor chair should have to earn their de jure lawn rooms.
Marta Cook is a Cavalier Daily Associate Editor. She can be reached at mcook@cavalierdaily.com.
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