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Chocolate liegeois
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One man, one vote: Vital concept rings true today**
What is the more dangerous: a drunken driver or an ill-cast vote? American society considers the ill-cast vote the lesser of the two evils. We vote at 18 but drink at 21; we rent a car at 25 but vote at 18.
Reasons abound for such differences. Actuarial tables show that young drivers are more likely to drive drunk than older ones and the same tables show younger drivers to be more accident prone than older ones. Unquestionably, society has a right to protect itself from drunken drivers and car rental firms should minimize costs by renting to as low risk clients as possible.
Despite the legitimate practical and economic rationales given to justify the different age requirements, the underlying message holds little ambiguity: It takes more individual responsibility to drive safely than to cast a vote, and the damage done to society from the former is less than the latter.
Given the massive disenfranchisement felt by many people toward the political processes which drive our nation, it does not seem at all strange that such little weight is given to the power of the vote. Moreover, we can all conceptualize the pain inflicted through recklessness on the road; to visualize the impact of a vote requires a much greater stretch of the imagination.
Had one person in every voting district voted differently, Nixon would have defeated Kennedy in the popular vote in 1960. Lyndon Johnson won his 1948 senate seat by 84 votes out of more than a million cast. State and local representatives all over the nation routinely win by margins measured in the hundreds, not thousands. Though a single vote has little statistical significance, anecdotally, most states and many national races have been determined by exceptionally small margins of victory. Voting, too, has tangible consequences; we just don't feel them as readily.
It will prove a colossal mistake if as a society we continue to minimize the importance of the vote relative to other pursuits. We anticipate 16, for it gives us the freedom of the car; we anticipate 21, for it gives us the freedom to drink, and too often we await 18, feeling that that, too, gives us another freedom of the vote, and that is the problem. Where we are free to drive and free to drink, we have no obligation to do either; the individual responsibility involved regards actions already committed to drive carefully, to drink moderately.
Voting is an affirmative responsibility, our obligation to vote is free of any qualifier; it is plain; it is simple and, more often than not, it is forgotten.
When children turn eighteen and mature into adulthood, they receive notification that they will not receive their voter registration card until they register for the draft. Their first experience with electoral politics is a quid pro quo, and the message is an enduring one. The country barters the vote for military service, and citizens trade that vote for congressional responsiveness. The vote becomes a tool of individual worth rather than an instrument of collective responsibility.
The next presidential election will prove important not only for the broad political platitudes given everytwo years but also because it will indicate the national strength of commitment evidence by the 1994 mid-term elections. Now is the time to examine next year's candidates.
The vote is more than an individual's political worth. It is a weapon of amazing potency capable of instituting great change; we must not blunt it through apathy.
Alex Rogers is a Trinity senior.
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