Let’s be honest — you are more likely to run into a county councilor at the grocery store than President Barack Obama.
You are more likely to call a local school board member with a complaint than the U.S. Department of Education.
And that pothole that’s threatening to swallow your Fiat? Chances are that you’ll contact a city or county official about it rather than fire off a nasty email to Sen. Maria Cantwell.
The fact is that local elections matter, not that many of us act as though they do.
“The thing that’s frustrating is that voters turn out in droves for the presidential election, for a whole host of reasons,” Secretary of State Kim Wyman said during a recent meeting with The Columbian. “The president of the United States doesn’t really affect your daily life that much.
“But the people who do — the port commissioners and the city council members and the school board directors — are literally making decisions that affect your daily life, from the quality of your roads, to the books your kids read in school, to how fast a first responder gets to you. Those decisions are made in these elections and, ironically, these have the lowest turnout.”
Wyman oversees elections throughout the state, in case you were wondering what the secretary of state does. And with a primary election on the docket for Tuesday, she is in the throes of an annual lament over voter turnout. “Statewide,” she noted, “when we look at the historic turnout for an odd-year primary, it’s running about 26 percent on average, which is very disappointing.”
That 26 percent is out of those who have registered to vote. There’s a whole other population of voting-age adults who don’t even bother to register. That, of course, is their choice, and not voting is in its own way a manner of voting — even it is born of apathy.
Yet it is difficult to ignore the importance of this year’s election cycle. In Clark County, we will be adding two members to the county council, including a chair and a representative from newly created District 2. This might not sound as exciting as debating the importance of Hillary Clinton’s emails or Donald Trump’s hairpiece, but the county council makes daily-life decisions such as hiring somebody to lead the Department of Environmental Services. We also will be choosing a new member for the Port of Vancouver Board of Commissioners, and if you don’t recognize the importance of that, you might want to do a Google search for “Vancouver oil terminal.”
City council positions, school board positions, mayoral offices, judgeships — each of them will be decided this fall in one jurisdiction or another throughout the county. And while Tuesday’s primary is merely the first round, determining two candidates in each race who will advance to the Nov. 3 general election, the entire process has a trickle-down effect. As Sarah Elkind, a professor at San Diego State University and author of “How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy,” told Marketplace.org: “Most of the government that matters in our daily lives — and an awful lot of the federal spending and federal programs — are happening because local communities want them.”
With that said, lamenting low voter turnout is a double-edged sword. While democracy is best served when a vast cadre of citizens get involved, there remains the conundrum of urging the uninformed to cast a ballot. As Wyman said: “I guess the flip side is it really does empower those people who turn out to really have an influence. In primary elections in particular, those people who cast their ballots have a lot of influence because most people choose not to.”
And yet it comes down to this: Would you rather have your neighbors decide what your kids are reading in school and how quickly that pothole gets fixed and how well our first responders are supported, or would you like to have a say? Or maybe you are too busy waiting for President Obama at the grocery store.
