EDITORIAL: We strengthen democracy by voting
Most historians place the birthplace of democracy in ancient Greece and also pinpoint it as the location where voting first took place. It didn’t encompass everyone – women and slaves were among those excluded – but it allowed for people to have a say in how they were governed and not be entirely subject to the whims of a dictator or a ruling class.
Through the long span of human history, most people have not lived in small-d democratic systems. A motley collection of monarchs, autocrats and oligarchs have called the shots. The fact that we live in such a system, have the right to decide who will make laws in our name, and have the ability to cast them out of office if we feel they are not up to the task or make decisions that we abhor, is an invaluable right that we should not take for granted.
The ultimate expression of our rights as citizens is voting. Many Pennsylvanians may have already cast a ballot by mail or through early voting recently. But this election season, which has seen the commonwealth at the forefront of the national conversation, will wind up Tuesday. That’s when many people will go to a local polling place and decide who will be living in the White House for the next four years, who will serve in the U.S. Senate and House and a variety of statewide offices. If you are registered to vote, we urge you to make your voices heard.
It’s often been noted that the United States is the world’s longest-running and most successful democracy. But that democratic “experiment,” as it has sometimes been termed, has not been perfect and has grown in fits and starts. At first, only white male landowners were allowed to vote in the United States. As in ancient Greece, women were long denied voting rights. It took decades of work by activists and the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 for women to gain access to the ballot box. Black Americans were also barred from voting, either through violence and intimidation or disenfranchisement tools like literacy tests. This was embedded in Southern life until the Voting Rights Act in 1965 prohibited discriminatory voting practices. Until the early 1970s, you had to be aged 21 years or older in order to vote, even as men younger than that were being shipped off to Vietnam.
The revered late Georgia congressman John Lewis knew all too well the viciousness and oppression of the Jim Crow South, and he once said, “The vote is precious. It is almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy.”
It might not bring immediate change or a perfect world, but, as Lewis said, it is the most powerful tool we have as citizens.
As Election Day draws closer, we should also think about what President Franklin Roosevelt said in a radio address in October 1944, one month before he was elected to a fourth term he didn’t live to complete: “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the way they could do that is by not voting.”