Your Vote Matters

Oof, this is going to come off a little cynical, isn’t it? I guess I should lead with this, then: Yes, I voted today. Despite all this essay might say, I still vote regularly. But…

In an online town hall, Bernie Sanders described this midterm as “the most important Midterm of our generation,” kind of like how two years ago was “the most important election of our generation” and while I don’t really remember the rhetoric of four years ago the midterms were probably important then too (not important enough, of course, to get the average American to vote but ehhh…).

Another common piece of rhetoric is “Your vote matters. Your vote always matters.” And yes, there are a myriad of examples where this is true. Anecdotes abound of ties and near-ties and coin flips and recounts, but where I think these go wrong is not providing examples of the other side of the coin: The times when it’s almost unanimous but not quite. Sure, these examples negate the general argument the “Voting Matters” people are trying to make (you can make a difference), but perhaps consider this alternative argument: “You should let your voice be heard.” This, I think, can be demonstrated very well with these sorts of overwhelming defeats.

So here’s my story. It’s nothing so dramatic as a federal or even state election; it was a high school student-level forum. Now, my high-school was a little different in that they tried to let their students have much more of a say in the goings-on of the school. Every one of these meetings, somebody tried to move the school’s dress code away from business casual, for example.

The big-name item on this particular meeting was the school’s schedule. The high school was in many ways an extension of the big-name college in the city. Seniors and even many Juniors took a lot of college-level classes and the high-school had a lot of oddities to accommodate that. The one most specific for this essay was the trimester-style scheduling, which itself mirrored the college experience at the time.

But times change. The college was moving to semesters, with an auxiliary “May-term” to accommodate missing any credit hours that might be lost in the schedule change. The proposal for the high school was a similar semester schedule, but with a “January term” or “J-term” for… reasons I don’t really remember anymore.

I remember Freshman-age me not being a particular fan of this change. The tentative schedule proposed still didn’t sync up all that well with the colleges, and J-term seemed needlessly complex. I also wasn’t really convinced by the arguments to change. The most egregious argument came from one then-Junior who really wanted to go sailing over summer break and this schedule would… cut into that I guess? By a week or two? The point was, I felt it was in my best interest if the school kept going with its trimester-styled schedule.

Voting was something of an embarrassing experience. Instead of counting “ayes” or ballots, they had all in favor of a particular motion stand up and those running the meeting would gauge the results from there. Voting in favor of trimesters went first, so up I went.

Nobody else stood up with me.

Some people laughed. I heard somebody yell “Sit down!”

The next morning, the results of the forum were announced. The semester schedule won in a unanimous fashion. Now, a quick google search of the word “unanimous” will yield this:

u·nan·i·mous
/yo͞oˈnanəməs/
[...]
2. (of an opinion, decision, or vote) held or carried by everyone involved.

Uh huh.

I tried not to cause too much of a disruption, but I do remember saying, “It wasn’t unanimous.”

The response was, “It was basically unanimous.”

These sorts of fora at my high school died out within a few years and I think this was one of the reasons why. Even at the level people reference when attempting to convince people to go to the polls, the most micro of levels, votes can get discounted.

Again, this is going to come off as cynical. One could easily read this as a cautionary tale against democracy. But to me, I think about this as trying my damnedest to get an opinion across. Sure I failed (and, as a schadenfreude-y aside, J-term did turn out to be a needlessly complex addition to an already weird high school), but I did try. And when I filled out my ballot today, that’s what I thought about.

-F