Vote first, then complain…

OUR VIEW

A re you sick of election signs and commercials yet?

Would you rather get a root canal than listen to some gaggle of talking heads go on and on about candidates and issues. Are you just tired of the whole process?

Well, too bad!

Yes, it’s election season, and this year is certainly an interesting one. Around here, it’s already primary time. Early voting is still going on for a few days, and then on Tuesday, Arkansas will be one of more than a dozen states casting votes in the primary and judicial elections.

Try to contain your excitement.

So, have you voted yet? Are you planning to vote? Are you even registered to vote? Evidence suggests that it will be a pretty low voter turnout. That should not be surprising to anyone who has paid any sort of attention to things around the Crittenden County election scene. We usually manage pretty low turnout numbers, such as the last couple of millage and bond votes where, if I remember correctly, we had single-digit numbers in at least one of those.

Why don’t we vote? It’s not because we don’t have opinions on the issues or the candidates. All you have to do is get on Facebook and you can see EVERYONE has an opinion… sometimes terrible ones, but that’s how it works with opinions. Funny thing, though… “Facebook likes” don’t count as actual votes. If you really want your opinion to matter, you’ve got to go to the polls and push the little buttons.

And don’t give me that business about your vote not mattering. “One vote never made a difference” is not only wrong, it’s just nonsense. Yes, one single vote very rarely decides a race, but that’s actually a good thing. That’s democracy. It’s a bunch of single votes coming together to represent the will of the people.

There’s this old philosophical paradox called “The Paradox of the Heap” that I learned about in my college philosophy class. It goes like this: There’s a heap of rice. We can all agree that it’s a heap of rice. So, take away a single grain of rice. Is it still a heap? Well, sure it is. It’s just one grain of rice. OK, take away another grain. Is it still a heap? Yeah, sure. What about if you take away one more grain?

You see where I’m going with this?

A single grain of rice isn’t a heap. Neither is two. What about 20? Would you say a thousand grains of rice make a heap? Probably so. But 10,000 grains of rice makes an even more impressive heap. In philosophical terms, at some point, if you take away enough grains of rice, it is no longer “a heap” of rice. But that means, there has to be some point where one single grain of rice makes a heap or it doesn’t.

Voting is like that. You can’t usually look at an election and say, “That single vote right there made the difference,” but when you heap all of the votes together, you can make a heap and whoever’s heap is bigger, they win! That becomes especially important when you’re looking at something like a presidential primary, where we’ve got more than a dozen candidates all hoping you’ll put your grain of rice on their heap.

But it’s not just the presidential races you should take interest in. Buried down the ballot are some pretty important judicial races. We’re not going to endorse any particular candidates here, but do a little looking into who these candidates are. We’ve run a list of them in the paper a few times already, so hopefully you know their names. Get on the Internet or ask around about who these candidates are, what they’ve done and where they’re from.

A few of you will also vote on Justice of the Peace candidates. Don’t overlook these important races. I actually run into folks pretty frequently who aren’t really even sure what a Justice of the Peace is, what they do, or even what the Crittenden County Quorum Court is. We’re all pretty familiar with the mayor and the city council of whatever community we live in. If you don’t know, the Quorum Court is like a city council for the whole of Crittenden County, with the county judge, currently the honorable Woody Wheeless, serving as what would be the county mayor in other places.

Sure, it’s kind of inconvenient, but take the time to go vote. The old saying is that if you don’t vote, you can’t complain. Unfortunately, that’s not a legally enforceable statute. So… vote first, then complain.