The stay-at-home vote
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t was the acid-tongued newspaperman H.L. Mencken who opined that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
We understand that this truth is lost on about 90 percent of registered voters in the Top of Utah.
For those who are old enough to vote, but don't even bother to register, the figure is 100 percent -- signifying complete, willful ignorance.
Too harsh? No, not by a long shot.
Although we are willing to agree there are two schools of thought on this subject.
The first, the one we subscribe to, is that everyone who is able to vote should vote, so that the will of the people -- not just a narrow slice of the population -- can be known.
The other line of thinking holds that the truly clueless should not be encouraged to vote.
They should allow the special interests, the people who bother to read newspapers and nonfiction books, who pay attention to current issues and manage to get off their fannies and down to the voting booth to choose our leaders.
We get it. We understand that most of the people who are reading this editorial are people who vote. Whether or not you agree with our opinions, you take the time to read them, to think about them, to decide for yourselves.
Because you are engaged, you feel the tug to cast a ballot. You understand that the most influence you will have is voting in municipal and county elections -- arguably the level of government that affects us the most on a day-to-day basis. The people who are clued-in -- you, who are holding this paper in your hands or reading it on your computer monitor -- realize that.
If we seem a little cranky, it's because we've seen the low voter turnout numbers for the Top of Utah communities that held primary elections on Tuesday; we are passionate about our part of the state, but it almost makes us want to give up trying. The expectations of local officials are so diminished, have been so beaten down over the years of voter apathy, that Perry City Recorder Susan Obray told our reporter she was "really pleased" by her city's 18 percent turnout.
We mean no disrespect to her, but less than 1 in 5 voters bothering to vote is nothing short of shameful, and Perry voters did better than any other city in Weber or Box Elder counties: Riverdale's turnout was 16.3 percent, Ogden's was 15 percent, Harrisville's was 13.3 percent, Brigham City had 13 percent, Farr West saw 10 percent of its voters on Tuesday, and in North Ogden only 7.6 percent showed up.
The situation was, overall, no better in Davis County. While 22.1 percent of Sunset voters cast ballots, Farmington saw 16 percent turnout, South Weber was next with 12.6 percent, Layton had 9.56 percent and Clinton saw 6.1 percent of its voters.
It's just ugly and sad, and maybe Mencken was right -- maybe that's exactly what we deserve.
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