It was fall 2000 and as a volunteer for the Ralph Nader campaign and a fresh Associated Student Government senator, I had been urged doubly to register my classmates to vote. Bright-eyed ASG leaders had sent the necessary forms back to my dorm, and for more than a week, I badgered students I hardly knew with talking points on why they needed to vote and what was at stake.
Looking back, I’m a little embarrassed. I know why I did it: We politically obsessed students truly believed voting was vital and our classmates had to do it to save their souls from Dante’s sixth circle. Smarmy foreigners use our low turnout to prove America is in a downward spiral. Activists say young people are screwed by the government because they don’t bother to vote.
But it doesn’t particularly matter whether Northwestern students vote. It doesn’t matter to the world at large and it doesn’t matter to our Evanston neighbors. In fact, the vote you cast for your favorite American Idol may have more bearing on your life than the vote you cast for president.
For starters, as an NU student you have next to nothing at stake in a national election. You go to a private school, so you won’t feel the effect of a reeling education budget. You probably don’t pay taxes; if you do, you’re in the lowest bracket, and neither party is going to shake you down.
Does George W. Bush make you worry about war or a draft? Well, John Kerry doesn’t plan on pulling us out of Iraq, and Democratic congressmen like Rep. Charles Rangel of New York are the only ones talking about military conscription. Do you want to smash the World Bank? As any member of Peace Project or the Objectivist Club could tell you, either party is going to follow basically the same capitalist policies.
The issues that fire up most NU students — abortion rights, globalization, gay marriage, war and peace — currently aren’t affecting us directly. At the moment, we’re hovering in a rarefied, moneyed nirvana where political problems crop up as ideas to be studied. When we vote we’re playing around with decisions that will have a bigger impact on other people.
The other people can take care of themselves and they do. Evanston votes solidly for liberal Democrats in the state House, state Senate and U.S. House, typically giving the Republicans a lopsided defeat. The reason for encouraging students to vote that was offered in a recent Rolling Stone article — that “keeping turnout down among voters at one major college campus in each battleground state could tip the election to the Republicans” — doesn’t apply here.
Even the reasons for voting in a local election are a little specious. Would throwing our weight against one alderman or another really do more for the way Evanston treats us than, say, donating our time to helping at a local church or school?
I wouldn’t suggest that students actually restrain their friends from voting. Punching a vote card isn’t going to get anyone hurt. But it’s rude to assume your love of politics must be forced upon your peers. If they don’t want to vote, they’ve got nothing to lose.
