By Larry Vetter
The 19th Amendment of the US Constitution is ratified granting women the right to vote. Celebrate Women’s Equality Day.
This year, women’s equality day is celebrated on August 26. It is somewhat amazing to think that women have only been able to vote in the United States for less than 100 years. August 18, 1920 was the culmination of what began in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY. Essentially it took 72 years of protests and hard work to achieve this goal. Most of the women who began the struggle in 1848 never lived to see the results.
Obviously the right to vote was cherished by all citizens. Think of the struggle various groups fought and the numbers of Americans killed and injured in wars to achieve that right and to get to where we are today. Let’s now fast forward to 2015 Smithtown.
We have roughly 100,000 US citizens living in Smithtown of voting age. Of that number only about 82,000 are registered to vote. That means that 18,000 people don’t exist on voter rolls to begin with. Out of the 82,000 registered, roughly 18,000 per year vote in Smithtown whether it is a presidential year or simply local elections. Out of that group, roughly 12,000 votes are the same year after year with a straight across the line vote regardless of who is running. Therefore, those 12,000 people have been dictating how 100,000 voter-aged people’s town is run, money is spent and how we live our lives. To sum up, 18 to 19% of those eligible, vote each year. Those are the types of numbers reflected in disenfranchised areas such as poverty or crime-ridden districts where the populace feels the government has failed them. Smithtown is neither a poverty stricken nor a high crime area. So the question is “Why?”
There are several theories as to this phenomenon with the top being that a typical voter feels that their vote is meaningless. There may be some truth to that statement but the typical excuse I hear runs more along the lines of, “it was raining on election day”, “it was too cold”, or “I worked late and had to get home to the kids”.
Is it possible that maybe everyone is just tired of the annual “reality show” circus surrounding our politics? Instead of being a time to put our best foot forward, election season has become a time of airing out dirty laundry, slander and endless childish insults. It is well past time to take our government out of the hands of the people that treat it like a candy store, and elect individuals that can perform with skill and integrity and accomplish the jobs they were elected to do. Don’t we owe that to our children for whom we are to be role models and don’t we owe that to Susan B. Anthony for whom the 19th amendment is named.
Larry Vetter is the 2015 Democratic candidate for Smithtown Town Council