Editorial of October 5, 2023

Exercise Your Rights

“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

Plato

Since the founding of our country, the right to vote has undergone massive, and constant, change. Many of these changes have been beneficial and forward-thinking, ever expanding the concept of universal franchise; others have taken a step or many steps backward, flirting with disenfranchisement and instigating all means of voter restrictions. Through it all, states’ rights and the federal government have played a pivotal role.

In the Declaration of Independence, signed August 2, 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” Meaning, of course, the U.S. government is, in Abraham Lincoln’s words nearly a century later, “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

When the U.S. Constitution was adopted, on June 21, 1788, in lieu of a federal requirement the power to establish standards for voting rights was granted to the states, probably because the concept of a representative democracy was a new idea, much different from that of the permanent monarchies and principalities that covered the globe, and were not subject to a vote. The result was that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males over the age of 21 who owned property were given the right to vote.

In the 19th century, things got better. In February 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, granting Black men the right to vote and Congress the right to enforce that right, though Congress came immediately up against new barriers—poll taxes and literacy tests—that were enacted, for the most part, in the Southern states. (Poll taxes remained in place for nearly 100 years, until 1964, when the Twenty-Fourth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting their use in Federal elections; literacy tests were banned a year later, when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.)

Women, too, had a tough time. In 1787, women property owners could vote in New Jersey; those voting rights were taken away in 1807. Wyoming women got equal suffrage in 1868, and a decade later Utah women could vote. In 1883. Washington Territory women earned the right to vote, but, along with the women of Utah, lost that right in 1887. Women could vote in Colorado in 1893 and in Idaho in 1896, and that right was returned to them in Utah (1896) and Washington (1910). Slowly, in the early 20th century, other states granted women votes in some, but not in all, primaries and elections.

At last, the long-fought Susan B. Anthony Amendment—the Nineteenth Amendment—was passed in the Senate on June 4, 1919 by a vote of 56-25, and ratified on August 20, 1920, giving women suffrage. The Senate had defeated the amendment innumerable times since its first appearance in 1866; it was a 41-year multi-vote battle. Restrictions and discriminatory laws still exist.

Since then, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment of 1971, which lowered the voting age to U.S. citizens who are 18, have added immensely to our right to vote.

The right to vote has been hard earned; it must not be neglected.

Here, in Otsego County, there are 33,644 active registered voters but not all of them vote. Further, it is disheartening to see that in the forthcoming election, on November 7, of the 131 vacancies in the county certified to be filled there are 88 unopposed candidates. Six positions have no candidates at all.

We live in a democracy, and it’s up to us to uphold it. Exercise your right to vote, and your right to run for office.