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Letter: Don’t make democracy a laughingstock here
Op-Ed · September 04, 2014
Mark Twain once said, “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
Some people considered this funny when he said it 100 years ago, before women could vote, and while Jim Crow laws denied many more citizens their right to vote.
The fact is voting does make a difference and it’s certainly not funny to the millions of American citizens who have had their voting rights suppressed by states with Republican governors, legislatures, and secretaries of state, including attempts by Iowa’s Republican Secretary of State who spent $250,000 of our tax money and wasted four years searching for voter fraud with little result.
Conservative efforts to suppress the vote have led to voters in low income and minority districts waiting in line up to eight hours to cast a ballot. They have restricted early voting time and made voting and registration more difficult, actions which threaten the Constitutional right to vote. In spite of these actions, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme court chose to weaken the Voting Rights Act, thus thumbing their noses at democracy.
Iowa is better than this and so are Iowans. We need a secretary of state who will defend everyone’s right to vote and make it possible for working men and women to use early voting and absentee balloting. We need a secretary of state who believes in democratic principles, will enable and encourage voting. We need Brad Anderson, Democratic candidate for secretary of state.
Brad Anderson has set a goal of Iowa being No. 1 in the nation in voter turnout and will pursue online registration which would reduce paperwork for county election officials. He would also allow voters to automatically receive ballots by mail which would increase voter participation in city and school board elections. Brad Anderson knows voting is a fundamental democratic right of our citizens and he will defend it.
It would be a better use of tax money to encourage voting, making it easier instead of harder and giving our auditors and election officials the technology they need to do their job. This is what the Democrats and their secretary of state candidate, Brad Anderson, will do when elected.
Our votes can stop our democracy from being a laughingstock for the rest of the world and for comedians like Bill Vaughn who said, “A citizen of America will cross the ocean to defend democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.”
Will Rogers observed, “Half of Americans don’t vote and half of Americans don’t read newspapers, one can only hope it’s the same half.” That was funny nearly a hundred years ago but not so much today. Today we can only hope that people vote based on what they know rather than on what they have been led to believe.
Larry Hodgden, Tipton
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