I'd like to talk a little about voting.
In April, voters in Baltimore will be asked to choose Democratic and Republican nominees for Mayor. The general election is in November, but if history repeats itself, the Democrat who wins in April will prevail in November. For the first time in a long time, the incumbent is not running. As a result, the field is huge. Twenty-nine people are running for mayor of Baltimore City. Of those, 13 are Democrats. And 6 or 7 of those Democrats are given a decent-or-better chance to win. But just who will elect them?
In 2011, in the last Democratic Mayoral Primary, about 75,000 people voted, and more than 217,000 people who could have voted, didn't. Not involved, one way or the other. The winner of that primary, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, won it with just under 39,000 votes. She got about the same number of votes in the general election. Her Republican opponent got 6,000 votes. In the general election, 322,000 people -- more than half of the city’s residents-- could have voted, but didn’t.
Here’s what that means: 87% of eligible voters in our city chose not to be involved in electing the person who has run Baltimore for the past five years. If you accept the common wisdom that the Democrat always wins the general election, given that 9 out of 10 registered city voters are Democrats, then the calculation is only slightly less shameful. Fully 75% of registered Democrats chose not to be part of the decision. That’s a lot of people. Hundreds of thousands of voters could have had something to say about who would change the pension system, manage the snow storms, fire a police commissioner, hire a police commissioner, appoint school board members, address the budget deficits, and coordinate efforts to quell violence that injured hundreds of civilians and police, and wreaked havoc on nearly 400 businesses.
But in 2011, 9 out of 10 people had NOTHING to do with choosing the most important person in city government.
So back to those 6 or 7 viable Democrats on the ballot this April. If the same number of people don’t vote in the primary this time around, any one of those 6 or 7 could, statistically, win by getting fewer than 13,000 votes. Let’s say someone gets 20,000 votes, which is way less than Candidate Rawlings-Blake got the last time. And let’s say the rest of the candidates do what most of the candidates did the last time, which is to say they get fewer than 10,000 votes. That means the person with 20,000 votes wins in a landslide. 20,000 votes. Our next Mayor could be elected without earning the support of 94% of the people who live here.
You have to vote. It’s not just our civic duty. It’s our civic opportunity to let whoever wins know how he or she should govern. A vote for someone who loses sends just as powerful a message as a vote for the person who wins. We don’t have a run-off system in Baltimore, so it is possible that the person who wins the Democratic Primary for Mayor will win with more people voting against him or her than voting for him or her. Some would suggest that that’s a reason not to vote. Your vote doesn’t really count. Nonsense! If you win an election, you need to know how many people voted for you, and how many didn’t vote for you. People who just didn’t vote at all do nothing to inform the winner about what the city’s priorities should be.
You gotta vote!
What if, instead of 75,000 people voting in this primary, 375,000 people voted? Instead of almost nobody voting, what if almost everybody voted? What if the candidates who are running for Mayor had to convince hundreds of thousands of us instead of just 10 or 20,000 of us, that he or she is the best person for the job? And, of course, our votes for Mayor aren’t the only votes we’ll cast on April 26th. Candidates for City Council, the US Congress, the US Senate, and President are on the ballot as well. What if we were all part of all of these decisions? What if none of us succumbed to the cynicism that says government doesn’t matter? What if we started telling our elected officials that we are paying attention?
Here's a link to information on how to register. If you know someone who isn’t registered, please see to it that he or she does register. If somebody tells you that she isn’t voting, engage her. Talk her into it.
We have until April 5th to register to vote in the primary. Early voting starts April 14th. The primary is April 26th. We’ll give you the results that night here on WYPR.
I hope that when you hear those results, you’ll do so knowing that you are part of them.
Tom Hall
