Yes It Is, It’s True: I really don’t think ‘they’ want us to vote

I drop in every Wednesday afternoon at the venerable Then & Now historical library in Dorr, and in my more than four years of research, the most astonishing changes in public life over the years have been in elections, in participation in community affairs and in the explosion of girls in athletics.

I have written before about Prof. Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” concept in which fewer and fewer people these days get together on behalf of community improvements and quality of life. I have also written a great deal, with the insightful assistance of the late Zack Moushegian, about the rise of girls in sports and its massive impact on this histories of Wayland, Martin and Hopkins.

But also striking is the difference in elections between today and 50 years ago.

The pages of the Wayland Globe from the early to mid 1960s were just chock full of reports of upcoming elections and election results, many about school district votes.

It was in 1966 that Wayland had more than one election about becoming a home-rule city after being established as a village in 1868. There were elections on the proposed city charter, on who would serve on the first-ever City Council and who would be the two Wayland representatives on the Allegan County Board of Supervisors.

Then there were many elections in rural communities on whether they should join the Wayland, Hopkins or Martin school districts after the State of Michigan mandated all schools to offer K-12 education. This forced reorganization of rural districts and their annexation into the larger districts that included high schools.

This is not to mention the customary school board elections in June and the gubernatorial, congressional and state house and state senate elections of 1966.

It seemed as though every week the Globe had some kind of story about election results or upcoming elections and a discussion of the issues.

How times have changed. The state since those days of yesteryear has insisted elections can be held only three dates in every year, in May, in August and in November. The idea is for local governments to spend less money on elections for notices, for advertising and for opening the polls to welcome voters.

Yet there have been massive downsides, and I’m seeing them now as the 2016 general election approaches.

Because we can vote only on three specific dates, most of that burden now falls on the November general. The result is that there now exists a huge number of contests and issues that are drowned in a sea of information. Many are paying close attention to the current presidential debacle, but far fewer understand there are races for state representative, for township offices, for county elected positions and even for school board seats.

So the effect is that some races are overlooked, dwarfed by the massive amounts of money, campaigning and advertising  poured into the presidential contest. And though election for president is important because of potential for getting us back into wars or setting policy on important economic matters, the people who serve us much more up close are extremely important as well.

If it is true that having so many elections is expensive for local governments, they should have gone bankrupt a long time ago, there were so many, particularly when compared to today. How did we ever get along with such burdens?

Having fewer elections seems to go hand in hand with my increasingly uncomfortable worry that the powers that be don’t really want the people, the unwashed masses, to decide public matters and public officials. The state is trying its best to limit who can vote through voter ID restrictions, continues to insist most of us take time out of a work day to show up at the polls and now even limits the number of days per year in which we can vote.

And it wasn’t long ago when the state passed rules to make it more difficult for people to gather petitions to get issues on the state-wide ballot.

A Princeton University study recently declared that the United State of America is no longer a democracy, but instead is a plutocracy, government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. Given what I have seen over the past 50 years and particularly the new rules I’ve seen implemented regarding elections. I wholeheartedly agree.