Peter Godwin

Because we can’t be lazy about democracy

Whenever I hear someone say they aren’t going to vote—for various reasons: because they don’t live in a swing state, or as some kind of protest, or because they have no faith in the system—I have dueling reactions: anger and despair. 

Much of my career has been spent covering struggles for democracy in Africa, Eastern Europe, and beyond, among people desperate to achieve the vote, struggling valiantly for it. These people risk imprisonment, injury, and even their lives for the right to exercise their vote. They walk miles and line up for hours, days even. And most of them look to America as an example of democracy. They look to us for encouragement. And the corrosive message that a low turnout sends to them all is that we take our own democracy for granted. That we do not treasure our freedom of choice. We fail to cherish it. We are careless with it. Lazy even. To say nothing of the disrespect we show our own history. To people who struggled here to be enfranchised, African Americans and women. 

Whatever the tactical electoral arithmetic happens to be in your state, even if your party has a decisive lead, going to the polls is how we recharge our electoral engine with the fuel of legitimacy. Without that it may lose its vitality. And it becomes more vulnerable to those who try to rig it, along the lines of Stalin’s Soviet-style ballots; it’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes. Turning out in large numbers makes rigging more difficult. A popular vote that tallies with the Electoral College helps to ward off critics of American-style representation. 

In 2020 we stress-tested our democracy. It only narrowly survived. Let’s show the world that we are reliable guardians of our own freedoms. The minimum requirement of citizenship, it seems to me, is to exercise one’s vote. 

As Churchill famously put it, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

Of course, how you vote is up to you, but as George Orwell famously didn’t put it: “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims… but accomplices.” So this November, to help signal our rejection of festering Trump foolery and pride in prejudice, I will be turning out to vote, in a “safe” blue state, for Kamala Harris.

Peter Godwin is a Zimbabwean author and former human rights lawyer.