View from here: Get out the vote

Here’s an often-overlooked quirk of presidential elections: They’re decided not just by those who cast votes but also by those who don’t.
Consider the 2000 election. It came down to Florida, and the margin was 537 ballots. One could argue they swung the election, but in reality, the election was decided by the 5 million people in Florida who were eligible to vote but didn’t.
For this month’s issue, we sent staff writer Natalia Galicza to Arizona to explore this phenomenon. Her story opens with a man named David Haddon, an 86-year-old Air Force vet who has voted in every election since he was 18. But this year, he became so disillusioned by both parties he decided not to vote.
As Natalia writes, Haddon wasn’t alone. “His feeling of helplessness, his sense that democracy was imploding, and his suspicion that his vote didn’t matter — all had become more and more common across the country he loved.”
Haddon’s story hit close to home because, for the first time, two of my kids are old enough to vote. One of them isn’t sure he’s going to, though, for the same reasons Haddon lists. He also feels dissatisfied by both candidates, but there’s a bigger motivating factor: He fears our system is rigged.
I thought about the difference a president makes reading this month’s cover story, “The Voices That Cracked Stone,” by Ethan Bauer. It’s a riveting account of the days leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened 35 years ago next month. As a kid, this was one of the biggest historical milestones in my life, and yet I learned some new things reading Ethan’s account, namely that most of Reagan’s advisers warned him against making the speech, but he did anyway, highlighted by the iconic line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
I was struck by the difference a few words can make in shaping world history. There was of course much more to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union than that speech, but it served as a powerful accelerant. If nothing else, it showed the influence an American president can have, for good or ill, in world events.
Those who study autocracies have been pointing out for years that what America’s enemies want most isn’t necessarily one candidate over the other, but to undermine our belief in democracy. And so they use tools of disinformation to sow seeds of doubt in the importance of voting. They want us to think our system is no different than theirs; that democracy is a sham, that our politics are broken and irredeemably corrupt.
I’ve been a little dumbstruck over the last eight years by how much these ideas have spread in the American electorate. It’s not just my son; I know an alarming number of people who are mulling whether to vote in this election — brothers, friends from college, neighbors.
When the topic comes up, I often think of a visit to Sen. Mitt Romney’s office a few years ago, and a large map he kept on his wall. It was a timeline of world history, and as Romney told me, “Democracy barely makes a blip.” Most of history has been ruled by tyrants, he pointed out. America’s experiment in self-rule seems to be fighting against human nature.
A government truly for the people that holds its elected representatives to account is a miracle in that context. But it only survives if we care enough to engage in the process, despite its flaws. I hope my son will vote this year, to build the political power of his generation. And no matter your age, I hope you will too.
This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.