Voting Is A Right And Responsibility

Two weeks have gone by since “Ron’s List” became public and still, the Kootenai County Courthouse and local newspapers receive letters complaining about it.

“How dare you reach into the sanctity of the ballot box, make lists and proceed to use the power of your office to intimidate those who may not believe what you believe,” fumed Coeur d’Alene planner Steve Badraun in an open letter to Commissioner Ron Rankin.

Badraun and many others are upset that Rankin has asked for a list of those who didn’t vote in a special May election. A measure supported by Rankin to raise the county sales tax a half cent to pay for jail expansion failed. Worse, for Rankin, the important ballot issue attracted a voter turnout of only 12 percent. Now, when someone calls to complain about property taxes, Rankin checks to see if he voted. If he didn’t, Rankin refers him to a group of car dealers who led the charge against the sales tax proposal.

Unquestionably, Rankin is wrong to use his office to wage a personal vendetta against political opponents. But he deserves some credit for making a stand against voter apathy, a social ill that infects every corner of this country. Occasionally, this newspaper, as well as others, has made the same point as Rankin by publishing the names of prominent politicians and community leaders who didn’t vote in an election. If the mayor, a city council member or a legislator doesn’t vote, how can their platitudes about the importance of the ballot box be taken seriously?

Indeed, the ballot box is important. A free society uses it to select leaders, endorse political ideas and social agendas, build schools, impose taxes. The ability to vote is one of our most precious rights. We have fought wars to preserve it. Women lobbied for decades to obtain suffrage. Black men and women faced down angry dogs and angrier authorities in the segregated South to exercise their voter privilege.

Yet, Americans stay away from the ballot box in droves, offering a hundred and one excuses for shirking their constitutional duty. I was out of town. It was snowing. The polling place is too far from my house. The media did a poor job of covering the election. They’re all crooks any way. The dog ate my sample ballot.

A cursory review of Ron’s List is revealing. The following failed to vote during the important May election: three Coeur d’Alene City Council members, the Post Falls mayor, four Kootenai County legislators and 27 of 47 members of the county Republican Central Committee, including six of seven members of the executive board.

Rankin’s reaction to voter apathy was over the top. But his disgust is understandable. A Korean War combat veteran, he has fought and seen buddies die for that which we take so much for granted.