Listen to what I do, not what I say.

[catsittingstill]

Alisona had a thought-provoking poll on her journal this morning, that brought to mind something that I've been musing about for decades. The short version is roughly, "do you vote or not, and why, and how do you feel about it?"

I grew up in the USA, and my schools placed a lot of importance on teaching kids about democracy and so on. Unfortunately one of their strategies utterly backfired with me.

Every year (or possibly every term; I don't remember anymore) every grade would elect a class president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer. Kids would nominate each other in a big assembly, there would be a week or so of various posters in the hall, then there'd be another big assembly and the candidates would give speeches and we'd vote. Attendance was required.

Not one of the class officers had the power to so much as get us out of an hour of school. Their big moment of power was deciding whether the decorations at the sock hop would be apple green, or pink.

What this process taught me was that voting was a big, boring waste of time I could have spent reading, on what was essentially a popularity contest. The lesson was ground home, year after year, as I gradually lost interest in elections altogether. Nobody I cared about was going to win (okay, this was due to not having many friends; maybe most of the kids cared who won), and the outcome would make zero difference in my real life. As soon as attendance and voting were not required, I skipped it in favor of more interesting activities.

For years I didn't even know why I wasn't interested in voting. I knew I *should* be; all my teachers had talked about how important it was. But when it came to actually making the effort to register and go to the polls, my gut reaction was "why bother?"

Am I the only person who felt this way?

Comments

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Nope; I felt the same way. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I still do.

-h

[mrpsyklops.livejournal.com]

Does this mean that you feel that way, or that you don't currently vote? How can I help you get to the polls? Do you need help registering? (g)

I do think it is important to vote in both local and national elections. The older I get, the more important I think it is.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

I think I would have felt that way, except that I actually got somewhat involved in the real political process as a kid.

I went around with my mother delivering yard signs for a local politician's campaign; I handed out campaign brochures for another in a Fourth of July parade; a youth group I was involved with went on a non-partisan campaign knocking on doors on election day to make sure people could get to their polling places. Furthermore, I knew our state congresswoman and three City Council members. Stuff like that.

I mostly ignored the stupid school stuff; I never felt it had any relation to reality. If it had been my only exposure to "elections" I don't think it would have been terribly inspiring and might even have turned me off the way it did for you.

[(Anonymous)]

Donald fSB here. I feel that way too, on occasion. All the more so because I have never really followed the local elections, where my votes might have really made a difference. Still, I have regularly tried to vote in the national elections, if only because I did not want to look in the mirror the next day and think that I could have done something to keep that candidate from being elected.

I suppose it makes a difference where you are from. I live in New York, so my vote insignificantly affected Al Gore's margin of victory in the state. There are other states that matter more.

I am also encouraged to vote by some of my Republican friends, who regularly offer to not vote, so that our votes will cancel. Since I know they fully intend on making this offer to any Democrat silly enough to listen to them, and then voting themselves; I am further encouraged to vote. They may do this because nationally the state tends to vote democrat so they may feel they are wasting their votes even more than I do.

Ultimately, voter apathy means the fanatics win. The elections go to the most committed and most dedicated, because no body else cares enough to vote and to get the vote out. I remember a button that said "Why do I have to endure the government that you deserve". Well, thats the way the system works. Eventually, if enough people make the individual decision that their votes do not matter, somebody like Lyndon LaRouche will get elected.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I can see how you might have that experience; I had the opposite one. Our high school had student officers who had REAL power. Partly this was because we had some extraordinary politicians in the school who went out and *took* power, partly it was because the school believed in giving it to us, but our student government at one point succeeded in getting the hated director of campus schools (one step up from the principal) fired, on our own initiative. I grew up considering voting nearly a sacrament, convinced that the weight of the world was on my shoulders and never daring to miss a year, because I knew what it could do at its best/worst. In some ways, it's almost too much responsibility; I've found myself skipping elections in which I don't feel I know enough about all the candidates, researching obsessively so that doesn't happen in the first place, and in elections where I'm fairly confident that my vote doesn't matter, voting for the candidate I know will lose just so that I don't feel personally responsible for what the winner does that I don't like. I think if I'd had your school experience it probably would have affected me the way yours did, because the reverse affected me so dramatically.

[allisona.livejournal.com]

Of course, I realize that I am one of those teachers that you are referring to, the ones telling their students that voting is important and even believing it myself. I think it's a message worth hearing and worth teaching in the same way students are encouraged to become involved in the community in other ways- volunteering, picking up garbage, planting trees. It's the message that you do matter, your in-put is important, you can influence the future. The system may be imperfect but we don't improve it by ignoring it. Perhaps the message is naive. Perhaps none of them will hear me. Perhaps a future leader is sitting in the room.

Regardless, I will keep saying it :).

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

So here's a question: what can civic-minded teachers to do avoid running into the effect Cat's talking about? If you tell kids that voting is important but they can see their own powerlessness in contexts like the one Cat ran into, what can you to do to help show them that it's not always like that?

I don't have answers, but I'm very interested in answers others might have.

I suppose one answer is to help ensure that student government does have power, but that may be beyond a teacher's abilities.

Brainstorming here: I wonder if promoting interest in local real-world politics might be effective -- assigning students to look into local ballot measures, find out who's running the local campaigns, interview them, talk with volunteers, report back on how the elections come out. (I've been struck by how hard it is to find out who won after a local election, if you don't have a strong local weekly or daily newspaper.)

[(Anonymous)]

(Phil Parker here)
I've always felt that if you don't vote, you don't have any business complaining about the people elected by the people who did vote. So I always vote, to keep my complaining license up-to-date.

I'm pretty sure I thought that the student elections in high school were pretty stupid, and I know I thought the student government at the U of I was a joke, but that never made me feel that real elections were stupid.

As for elections being a big waste of time -- there's so much wrong with our political system right now that it's easy to feel like voting is a waste of time, but at the very worst, it's a small waste of time. I spent more time writing this comment than I ever spent voting, unless maybe you count the time that I came out of the polling place and discovered that I had a flat tire... :-)

Wow--thanks for the comments!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the comments, everyone; there are enough of them that I don't really have time to reply individually, so I'm going to add another comment here, then maybe reply to one or two specific things that I missed.

First off, I agree that voting is important. My head knows this. My gut is (thirty years later) only slowly figuring this out.

Second, I believe that our teachers honestly thought voting was important. I don't really (well, except in my more paranoid fantasies) believe that the whole class elections thing was intended to turn us off voting. It probably seemed like a good idea: "let's let them have their own play elections, to learn how real ones work."

Third, I see a couple of possibilities for circumventing the meta-message "elections are a boring waste of time on a meaningless popularity contest." First idea--toss the idea of grade school student elections altogether; the "student government" has no power to govern anyway. Second idea--keep the student government; give it real power. Scary thought, I admit. Third idea--present the elections up front as "play" elections. Maybe increase political awareness by providing students real information about real local political issues & have student "candidates" that campaign among their classmates using a platform of some of these issues. Heck, maybe have debates, and have some of the students be "journalists" who write about the candidates, or "broadcasters" who interview them, or "public relations people" who write ads for them. If you're going to play election, why not do it right?

Re: Wow--thanks for the comments!

[allisona.livejournal.com]

Hi folks,

Just got a lovely and unnecessary apology from Cat in e-mail thinking that she had upset me in this discussion. She hadn't at all and I'm sorry my tone didn't come across more clearly. Here's the note I just sent back to her:

Oh, no, truly, you misunderstood me! My first sentence in that letter was in more an ironic tone then at all upset :). Reading your post I could clearly understand your position and believe me, in high school I dealt with those kind of shallow elections based on popularity and limited power, too. I tend to be reluctant to hold mock elections in my classroom and I usually base my election units more on real life events, media and materials from Elections Canada.

I found myself more thinking that as a teacher teaching those same ethics that hadn't had an impact on you as a teenager, are they still valid in today's world? The conclusion to me is yes, the issue may be more how to demonstrate those values to the generation being taught right now (as one of your readers suggested).

Please know I'm not upset at all! I guess my wording didn't come across with the feelings I was exploring.

But I'm going to go back to let your readers there know I wasn't upset at all and I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.

Love the discussion and I was happy it was my original post that sparked it :).

Re: Wow--thanks for the comments!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Okay. I feel better now :-)

For clarification, I might mention that this was in grade school--about grade 4 to grade 8. This may have something to do with my perception that our "elected officials" had no real power--how much power is it practical to hand to 8 to 12 year olds? I think the elections continued in high school but attendance was no longer required so I spent the time in the library instead.

Re: Wow--thanks for the comments!

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

I think that you took an entirely reasonable message from the trivial elections that you took part in. It's not the message that was intended, but it is also not a hard thing to see might come about in the situation.

When I was in grade school, we tended to have elections mirroring some local or national elections, so that we could "vote" for the president, or someone who would serve on the school board. I think that this created less of the expectation that what we were doing would affect our worlds, (the way that an impotent student government would) which was probably a good thing. I do remember that the results of our elections were significantly different from the results of the grown-up ones, but I don't remember anyone taking the time to discuss why this might have been the case, which would have been an interesting thing to do, if we could have been gotten into it.

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

I know just what you mean - I often feel that my voting (or not) is insignificant. For many years I didn't vote because I could not see how my votes ever made a difference. For example, I could rarely find candidates who would fund NASA appropriately, and when I did, they tended to not win.

I have often heard the "If you don't vote, you don't have a right to complain about the results", and see where it is coming from, but still, when I can't see how to convince enough people of the essential rightness of my positions to vote the same way, I don't completely buy it.

Nowadays, I vote in the hope that my vote will count as either an additional piece of support for the winner or encouragement for the views of the loser. I still try to figure out how to encourage more people to vote the way that I would prefer. For a while, I kind of thought that it would take a serious long-term project, involving a number of similar-minded friends moving into one school district, convincing the school board and administration to take fluff out of the curriculum and replace it with much more substance, including parental support of kids and personal responsibility and lots of old-fashioned things like that, but it never really came together, and I am now too old for some of the ideas to work well. Oh well.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I thought of school voting as rather like rehearsal; a relatively safe version of the real thing. In New York City, where I grew up, voting is a big, visible activity. Reason for that is, where a city block has 1,000 residents, there's a crowd at the polls. And, nationally, New York is important; it gets lots of attention and visits from candidates and there's lots of the old US elite around the city. And it's close--there are voters (mostly black) near Bill Clinton's office in Harlem. In a place like NYC, local party workers ("ward heelers") will actually go out and remind people to vote; I've never seen that in Oregon.

Making registration a nuisance used to be policy, did you know? Regsitration has been a device for keeping "undesirables" from voting for many years. Populist groups of many stripes--most notably, I believe, The League of Women Voters, have for years been proposing that people be registered as part of issuing drivers license and id cards ("motor voter"), but the Republicans vociferously and successfully opposed it until 1993, when a somewhat weaker version of the law was signed by Bill Clinton. Now the forms are available at DMV offices and--for most states--on line. You still have to mail them in, though!