No excuse for Washington young people and other nonvoters to shirk election duty

Growing up in Washington, I naïvely thought that vote-by-mail was the norm everywhere. When I saw people on the streets in other states with “Just Voted” stickers, I was confused. I voted, too; where was my sticker?

I wanted that badge to show others that I took the time to vote, even if it was from home.

But with that sticker comes a price in other states. Voter suppression is still evident in many southern states including Alabama, Florida and Texas; other US states have less obvious forms of it. In states without vote-by-mail, people line sidewalks (even during a pandemic) and wait hours to try to get into crowded polling stations.

In comparison, we Washingtonians have it easy. As of July, 4 out of 5 eligible Washingtonians were registered to vote, which on its own sounds great, patriotic even.

But not everyone who is registered actually votes. In the last 2016 presidential election, 78.76% of registered Washington voters returned their ballots. While this percentage seems satisfactory – a C+ on the grading scale — it still means that a little less than one million registered voters did not vote.

When it comes to off-year local/state elections, the statistics only get worse. In the 2019 Washington general election, only 45.2% of registered voters cast their vote. And though this number is up from the 2017 odd-year election (37.1%), it still leaves the question: Where do the majority of eligible voters go during local elections?

There is virtually no excuse not to vote here. Washington is one of the few states with successful mail-in-voting

Now, I’m not advocating for anyone to vote just for the sake of voting. Since we have the luxury of at-home, early voting, we have the time to educate ourselves, especially during this time of lockdown.

While anyone, regardless of what state they are in, can research their candidates, we have the amenity of being able to educate ourselves with ballot in hand.

When it comes to the 20% of Washington’s voting-eligible population who aren’t registered, 41.1% say it’s because they “are not interested in politics or the election,” according to a survey from the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

I think we all have that friend who is “just not into politics.” However, no one can truly be apolitical. Believe it or not, by not touching politics you still take a political stance. When you turn a blind eye to issues that don’t concern you, you are inadvertently defending the status quo.

Looking beyond the November presidential race, our local pool of elected officials could potentially produce a presidential candidate. Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator in 1997, a US senator in 2005 and then elected president in 2008.

Early in the 2020 election season we had governors, including Washington’s Jay Inslee, and even mayors, Pete Buttigieg and Bill de Blasio, vying for the presidency.

Voters (and non-voters) decide who moves up in the political pyramid, and whose voice is heard for years to come. So why should fewer than half of Washington voters decide who is heard?

Meghan Keeney is a dancer and writer who grew up in Puyallup and graduated from Rogers High School. She is social media manager for Students for Justice. a non-partisan, non-profit organization fighting against voter suppression. More of her work can be seen at meghankeeney.com.