Vote

At last count, there are 3.8 million registered voters in the state of Alabama.

Thanks to the redistricting shenanigans that confused many voters earlier this year, the Secretary of State’s office reported a voter turnout of 5.2% in August’s runoff elections. Earlier in the summer, Alabamians had a whopping turnout rate of 10.7% for the primaries.

One must ask: people fought and died for this? Alabama played a central role in the struggle for voting rights for all, yet only five or ten percent of our citizens even bother to participate in the process?

As the old saying goes, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

This past Sunday morning, one of the Bible readings at church was from Exodus 22: “Thus says the LORD: ‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.  If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry … If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people, you shall not act like an extortioner toward him

by demanding interest from him. If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge, you shall return it to him before sunset; for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in? If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate.’"

That Old Testament reading is pretty harsh and direct – and yet, in our time of so much discussion about how faith forms our politics, take a look at the New Testament. Jesus Himself preached in Matthew 25 about caring for one another when, after the parable of the sheep and the goats, He said: “Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.” Earlier, in the Sermon on the Mount featured in Matthew chapter 5, Jesus taught some tough lessons: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ … When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. … Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.”

Sometimes in our quest to consolidate power, we forget that the original followers of Jesus included some unemployed fishermen, a prostitute, an ex-tax collector, and a few failed revolutionaries.  Jesus walked among the least of these – and preached constantly about caring for the orphans, the widowers, and foreigners. He advocated for peace and love. In His time, he was a radical, but for two thousand years the world has followed His teachings.

What exactly does this have to do with voting?

We have been inundated with attack ads featuring politicians of one stripe or another. These commercials often misrepresent a politician’s character and voting record, and there are many that feature outright lies. I understand why these commercials exist, but national-level fear-mongering about Alabama politics is simply ridiculous! We are about to elect state-level officials who will carry Alabama across the next four years. Sitting out the election due to disgust or feeling like your vote doesn’t count is not what we need to do.

In order to honor those who have fallen before us to give us the right to vote, we have to remember that a candidate may share many views with their party but sometimes differ and vote against the national party. There are also those who are so taken with the national-level representatives that all they can talk about is their D.C. credentials and connections.

A recent poll by Gray Television, which owns our local TV stations WSFA-TV 12 and WCOV-TV 20, found that our citizens are basing their votes on the following: corruption in politics; illegal immigrants; government spending; jobs; health care; crime; data centers; roads; and education. At the very bottom were two nationally divisive issues, guns and abortion, that have been settled in Alabama for a long time but still drive so many of the attack ads from the candidates.

This is an election for the citizens of Alabama, not the entire country. How do you feel about Alabama issues such as data centers? One gubernatorial candidate has come out strongly in favor of constructing as many data centers as possible in our state, while the other candidate is recommending a one-year moratorium until more fact-finding is done.  Another huge issue in our state is the price of fuel and groceries. Diesel fuel costs more today than at any time in history, near $7 a gallon, and that has been trickling down to the consumer from the trucking companies to the grocery stores. How willing Alabamians are to pay more for gas and groceries remains to be seen.

There are also four Constitutional amendments on the ballot this time around, three having to do with schools. Amendment 2 outlines a process for merging school systems in Alabama. Amendment 3 concerns the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer in schools, while Amendment 4 requires K-12 schools to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner”.  

Having been a public school teacher for 28 years, I never noticed us not having the Pledge or prayer in schools; so many people are talking about all these “woke” initiatives but I’ve never heard of any of them. Maybe in other places, but not Alabama.

If you were to dig deep into a social media site – let’s say, Tallassee CityWatch Uncut – and note the number of people who are reading and participating, it’s at over 26,000 people. That’s most of Elmore and Tallapoosa counties contributing on a discussion board.  And yet, in our last citywide election, 766 people participated. There are around 4,900 people in Tallassee, and they handed all decision-making over to less than 20% of the people.

Everyone in the world knows about the civil rights struggle that had its origins in this part of Alabama. It doesn’t matter about political party affiliation – what is tragic is that so few people care to participate. I understand the viewpoint that one vote doesn’t matter. There are some great people who choose to sit out elections because they feel the fix is already in – and I can understand why they feel that way. Yet, just giving up and not participating at all remains a mystery to me.  Before next Tuesday, study up on the candidates, and please honor those who gave us the right: vote.

Michael Bird is an assistant professor at Faulkner University.