Election Day Amounts to More Than Peanuts
To a lot of us, Election Day means no more than Push-the-Peanut Day.
A record low of 21 percent of Marylanders voted in June’s Primary Election. General Elections about double that percent.
That indifference I don’t quite get, for I love to vote. Election Day is as patriotic a date to me as the Fourth of July. True, punching my ballot, even for the candidates I most believe in, isn’t as much fun as parades and fireworks. But I feel pretty special exercising the right won for me not only by spunky rebels in britches but also by long-skirted Suffragettes. My grandmother marched so I can vote.
Patriotism is one reason I vote — but not the only one.
I vote because the people we elect have huge influence over our lives, for better or worse, and I’d prefer it be for the better. From statewide candidates like governor to local ones like North Beach mayor and city council, they’ll be making and enforcing the rules we have to live by.
For that reason, Election Day amounts to more than peanuts for all of us.
We give particular power to the people we elect to the General Assembly. They infiltrate our lives in all sorts of ways, even putting their hands in our pockets as they dictate the taxes we pay. In turn, we depend on them to give us value for those taxes.
Interestingly, for most of us who live in this part of Chesapeake County, delegates are also the people we can hold most accountable to represent us. It’s a simple fact of numbers. Anne Arundel County’s half a million citizens are represented by only seven council people. (Annapolitans and citizens of tiny Highland Beach do better; incorporated as towns, they elect mayors and councils). Delegates, on the other hand, are broadly accountable to only about 40,000 of us. Given the number of citizens who develop the relationship, it can be pretty intimate.
That same close relationship holds in Calvert, though that county’s form of government also gives its 91,000 citizens five commissioners to represent countywide interests. Citizens of the towns of Chesapeake Beach and North Beach have local representation, as well.
In this week’s issue, you’ll be meeting many of the people seeking control over and responsibility for your life.
We reached out to Anne Arundel and Calvert’s applicants for top state jobs — senator and delegate — in the General Assembly. Twenty-eight replied.
We asked one question: How do you use the Bay, and what will you do to keep this great resource alive and well?
Our readers, we told them, value the Chesapeake as our environmental, cultural and economic heart — and they vote their values.
Candidates who answered our question seem to agree. From tax-overboard tea partiers to tax-and-spend liberals, they professed dedication to the Chesapeake and its restoration. Over Bay Weekly’s 21 years, Bay restoration has risen to orthodoxy.
Over the years, the General Assembly has voted Bay values in hundreds of ways huge and small, by reducing the polluting flow of nutrients, both nitrogen and phosphate, from our sinks and toilets, water purification plants and septic systems, farm fields and yards, roof tops, roads and parking lots. That work takes money, and they’ve often made hard decision on where the money will come from.
Will the people we elect this time do even more, as Bay restoration demands? They all say so, and they all sound good. So how can you foresee the actions that will follow the words?
Look for specifics, and be wary of candidates who suggest that Bay problems are somebody else’s fault. Bay restoration is a job for which we each have first-person-singular responsibility.
This feature gives you grounds to judge the Bay bona fides of job seekers whose prospects depend on you — and more.
You’ll also meet these candidates as people seeking your trust. It’s harder to tar all politicians as scoundrels — harder to use that I-don’t-vote excuse — when you get closer to them as individuals.
Read on, and I promise you will.
I’m looking forward to November 4, when I’ll wear my i voted sticker as proudly as others wear their American flag lapel pins.
I hope you’ll join me at the polls on Election Day.
Or, if it’s more convenient, vote early. Early voting runs eight days, from Thursday, October 23 through Thursday, October 30, both weekdays and weekends, from 10am until 8pm. (Find early voting at www.elections.state.md.us/voting/early_voting_sites.html.)
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]