It seems like each election cycle I find myself baffled at how many — make that, how few — of us decided that voting is an important right to exercise.
A few days before we saw the first General Election ballot count on Nov. 3, I mused over the daily ballot count totals: 14 percent, 17 percent, 19 and 21 and just under 24 percent the week before the election. Finally, a surge pushed the countywide ballot count to 22,696 out of 47,509 registered voters — 47.77 percent.
For a county that, like the 38 other counties in Washington state, has an all mail-in (or drop in a ballot box) voting, this is not impressive. It’s depressing.
That statistic got even more depressing when I pored over statewide stats that show there are only six counties in the state that had better turnout (see results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/Turnout.html). Six! Statewide voter turnout will wind up just under 40 percent.
Beyond the actual results of the Nov. 3 election, the most common sentiment I heard around our fair town this week was, “Why aren’t people voting?”
My friends and I pondered the causes to this non-voting disease: Were the ballots too confusing? Ballot box hidden by overgrown foliage? Run out of stamps? Too busy poring over Donald Trump’s latest screed?
In then end, we surmised that folks just don’t care enough to fill out their ballots, which is understandable. Confidence in politicians seems to be at an all-time low, from D.C. to our local boards and committees.
It’s an interesting contrast to watch election days in other countries. In Myanmar, turnout is thought to have been 80 percent in the poll as the country takes steps away from decades of military rule. It’s Myanmar’s first openly contested national election for 25 years. People were waiting in long lines before dawn to vote, and despite some described “areas of intimidation,” the elections were conducted peacefully and fairly, according to BBC News. Last year, more than 50 people died in attacks by rebel groups threatening to disrupt any exercise of voting rights in the first multi-candidate election in decades.
It seems ludicrous to me that people in Clallam County don’t particularly care if they’re taxed more or less or the same, or who sets policies for the county and/or city they live in, or who sets the direction of their school district.
No worries. The way I figure it, with less than half of my neighbors voting, they’ve conceded their ballot and part of that goes to me. With current ballot totals, my vote (and my fellow voters’ vote) was worth about 2.09 votes this November.
I’m not really sure you want me holding that much power, folks, but I do thank you for not voting.
Is it really that bad?
A list from zippia.com made some headlines the other day, posting some rather disparaging figures on the state of the Olympic Peninsula’s job health.
According to Zippia, three of the six worst places in Washington state for employment are right here on our fair peninsula.
Port Townsend ranked No. 1, Sequim No. 5 and Port Angeles No. 6 out of 188 ranked cities and towns Zippia compared in their “Worst Place In Washington To Find A Job” list. Looking at only communities of at least 5,000 people, the San Francisco-based website for career planning and employment looked at this criteria: unemployment rate, recent job growth, future job growth, sales taxes and median household income.
(See www.zippia.com/advice/worst-places-in-washington-for-jobs/ for the full story.)
The rankings drew the ire of a number of local economic leaders.
“We have the highest percentages of entrepreneurs in the state,” Team Jefferson CEO Peter Quinn told the Peninsula Daily News last week. “That we have low sales tax revenue is not indicative of what is going on here.”
Port Angeles is not a hard place to find a job, added Bill Greenwood, executive director of the Economic Development Corporation of Clallam County, “if somebody wants to work.”
“We don’t have a good job balance in Port Angeles,” he said. “We have lots of people who are looking for jobs and lots of employers who can’t fill their open positions but we can’t get them to match up.”
Other cities making the dubious list include Aberdeen (No. 2), Hoquiam (No. 3), Tacoma (No. 4), Toppenish (No. 7), Lakewood (No. 8), Sunnyside (No. 9) and Ocean Shores (No. 10).
Admittedly, some of these Internet lists that make the rounds cause a stir for no good reason. Is it really shocking that Port Townsend and Sequim and Port Angeles struggle to offer the same opportunities that the dozens of cities in the I-5 corridor do?
It’s also a bit incongruous to hear community leaders laud the findings of other Internet lists that, for example, extol Sequim as among “The Best Places in America to Retire” or Port Angeles as Outside Magazine’s No. 2 “Best Town Ever,” and not come to grips with a list that has at least a comparable amount of data to drive its conclusion.
Economy healthy … and not
Those curious about the overall state of the U.S. economy got some good news — not great — when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a whopping new 271,000 jobs were added to the economy in October. New York Times reporter Neil Irwin looks at the state of the economy with a more circumspect view: “With the good October numbers added to the pile, here is a theory about the state of the economy: There is a big divergence between the industrial sector, where companies that are exposed to a strong dollar, slowing economies in emerging markets and low oil prices are being hammered, and the broader job market and consumer economy in the United States, which is pretty much fine.”
And finally …
Code.org, a nonprofit that offers free online lessons in computer programming to students from kindergarten to high school, offers students a one-hour tutorial on how to build their own Star Wars games and program the droids R2-D2, C-3PO and BB-8. What does that have to do with voting or the economy? Nothing. It’s just awesome.
Reach Gazette editor Michael Dashiell at editor@sequimgazette.com.
