EDITORIAL: We shouldn’t take the right to vote for granted

Susan B. Anthony once said, “Someone struggled for your right to vote. Use it.”
Anthony fought for the right of women to vote in the 19th century, and didn’t live long enough to see that right guaranteed across the United States in 1920. The expansion of voting rights across two-and-a-half centuries of American history is one of the markers of progress in this country. At the country’s dawn, only white men who owned property could vote. Some states added a religious test, further limiting ballot access to only Christians.
And even though the right to vote was extended to Black Americans through the Constitution in 1870, Southern states threw up barrier after barrier to keep Black people from exercising their franchise through literacy tests, poll taxes and sheer, brute intimidation. It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the power of the federal government to outlaw this kind of chicanery.
The right to vote is precious. It shouldn’t be taken for granted. If you have not already done so through a mail-in or absentee ballot, you should vote on Tuesday.
Midterm elections have typically not drawn the sort of turnout presidential elections do. However, if there’s a single upside to the intense polarization and turmoil that has marked American politics since about 2016 or so, it’s that it’s driven up voter turnout. In the 2014 midterm elections, only 36% of eligible voters roused themselves to cast ballots, the lowest midterm showing in 70 years. By contrast, turnout in 2018 was almost 50%, the best turnout since 1914. Some forecasters believe turnout this year could meet or exceed 2018’s total. We will find out in just a few days.
And voters can be assured that their votes will count and our elections are safe and fair. Despite the baseless voter fraud allegations that sprang from the 2020 election, instances of fraud are about as rare as Bigfoot sightings and almost never the result of an organized conspiracy. The Associated Press reported that of the 6.9 million votes cast in Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election, there were only 26 votes that election officials viewed as potentially fraudulent – nowhere close to being enough to change the results of the presidential election. The AP also found that cases of potential voter fraud were not the fruits of nefarious, wide-ranging conspiracies, but individual mistakes or misdeeds. For instance, one man voted twice, once for himself and once for his son.
Our system of voting, and our democracy, have served us well. It requires citizen participation to keep both strong.
As the hours tick down before Election Day, keep the following observation from Chicago newspaper columnist Sydney J. Harris in mind: “Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.”