Freedom, patriotism, the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers — all rallying cries when talking about politics in the United States. But we don’t hear much talk about our responsibilities as citizens in a free society. Every freedom we enjoy comes with citizen responsibilities. Here are three points to ponder as we look ahead to both the City and Borough of Juneau and general elections this fall.
Point One: Get registered to vote as soon as possible. It’s easy and takes just 10 minutes. Even if you are too late for the CBJ election, you will be ready for November and all following elections. But don’t forget that in November, if you are not registered, you can still vote for President and Vice-President by showing up at a polling place and casting a questioned ballot.
Point Two: Educate yourself about the issues by checking a variety of information sources. Listen to reasonable logic on both sides of an issue. Be wary of sources and speakers that rely on errors in logic like the seven listed below.
1. Oversimplification involves ignoring the complexity of an issue or policy. Most public issues and policies are fairly complicated, and clever sound bites don’t do them justice.
2. Stereotyping means casting all members of a group into the same, usually negative, light based on one or two examples. Don’t base your vote on this fallacy. Every candidate is an individual with his or her own public policy suggestions and, as such, deserves careful consideration.
3. Name-calling attacks by the candidate or party that ignores the important issues. Name-calling impairs the citizen’s ability to hear and participate in a civil discussion of the complex business of running a free country. Be polite to those you disagree with and demand that they do the same, and then focus on the issues and the policies behind them.
4. Faulty cause and effect can lead to conclusions that are false. This can happen when one event closely follows another, making it appear that the first event caused the second.
5. Either/or arguments are based on the idea that if you disagree with a point of view you are unpatriotic, a socialist, a communist, or a fascist (for example). This type of argument tends to polarize a discussion and ignore issue complexity. In addition, these arguments reduce the discussion to name calling and stereotyping, leaving no room for the type of discussion that might result in creative problem-solving.
6. Appeals to emotion invoking fear, religion, patriotism, hatred or other powerful emotional triggers can move the conversation away from logic and weaken efforts at compromise. For example, don’t let images of patriotic flags or unflattering candidate pictures be the only thing to shape your vote. Temper emotional responses with logic when you are making decisions.
7. Unsupported Assertions state that something is true without offering credible proof to back up those assertions. Always search for the facts behind such statements. Half-truths have a way of creeping into politics; they may sound true until you search further.
Point Three: After you have armed yourself with the facts, VOTE! Low voter turnout can mean that less than half of the registered voters are making the decisions for the rest of the population. That is not how a democracy or a republic is supposed to work. Do the math: Alaska just completed a Primary Election with a voter turnout of 17.3 percent of 515,714 registered voters, equaling 89,111 ballots cast. This means that 17.3 percent of the registered voters made the choices that we will be voting on in November for both the State Legislature and the U.S. Congress. A democracy is diminished when only 17 percent of the registered voters go to the polls and make decisions for the remaining 83 percent.
Here I should mention the Founding Fathers and their imagined disgust at recent voter turnout; such a reference would be an obvious appeal to patriotism to get out the vote. However, history teaches us that those Founding Fathers didn’t allow minorities or women to vote; in fact, it was only through many decades in which women and minorities fought and risked their lives to win the right to vote that they were allowed to enter the voting booth. This is a historical fact, documented in most history books, and, yes, mentioning this fact is meant to appeal to both logic and emotion to get you out to the polls!
• Judy Andree is a member of the Juneau League of Women Voters.
