Barbara Patton: No reason for voters not to turn out

As Americans, we all believe in the right to vote. But how often do we exercise that right?
An e-mail I recently received caused me to go and look at the number of people that voted in the August 2008 Opelika mayoral and council election and then compare those numbers to the ones in 1996.

From this comparison, it seems that the number of people that are voting is decreasing in the City of Opelika. In the mayoral race in the 1996 election, 5,687 people voted compared to the 4,776 voters in the 2008 election. That’s down 911 votes.

In 1996 there were 3 mayoral candidates, and in 2008, there were two. Logically, that would be the reason for the decrease in the number. More candidates bring out more voters, right? If you look at the council races, that logic doesn’t hold true. In Ward 2 in 1996, there were two candidates and the votes totaled 813; whereas in 2008, with three candidates, the number of votes was only 790.

In Ward 5, there were two candidates in both election years and there were 1,501 votes in 1996 and in 2008, 1,324. There were also more votes in Ward 1 in 1996 (952) than in 2008 (952) with two candidates. Ward 3 and Ward 4 could not be compared due to lack of opposition in some years.

Opelika’s population has not decreased, so that can’t be the reason. I wonder if this is a national trend. It would be interesting to know who is not voting and why. Can those not voting be classified by gender, race or age? Or are they not voting across the board?

Do we just care less now about using the right to vote that so many fought to give us than we did only 12 years ago?

The e-mail I received referenced the movie, “Iron Jawed Angels” that HBO released on video and DVD. I have not seen the movie, but the e-mail was graphic enough in the pictures and script of what women went through to gain the right to vote that was finally granted in 1920. A quote beneath a picture of the women picketing the White House in asking for the right to vote tells of the happenings on Nov. 15, 1917:

“The women were innocent and defenseless ... and by the end of the night they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and (with) their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’”

This became known as the ‘Night of Terror’ to the suffragists imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia.

Do we need to be reminded of the women, the blacks, the poor that didn’t have the right to vote for so long in our history?

I guess we do.

As in so many things, we humans need to be reminded over and over again. In this presidential election, whether Republican, Democrat or Independent, let’s make those numbers rise instead of fall.

Barbara Patton is director of Envision Opelika and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.