The Voter’s Choice

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Jason Bowns
November 25, 2024

Note: The following article predates the recent election.

Election Day is imminent, and you might have heard snippets of that perennial debate about voter registration procedures, absentee ballot boxes and contemporary disenfranchisement fears.

What happens when your right to vote remains unscathed? History’s annals proclaim how your own arrival into this private deliberation space came sooner for some than it did for others such as indigents, women, African-Americans and anyone aged younger than twenty-one years.

Your local polling location will ask you to use a pen, touchscreen or to pull an old school lever which noisily clocks, closing that dainty election booth curtain. This voting power is yours alone to wield, as it will literally sit there in the palm of your hand. In such a solitary moment, what will you do? An especially efficient strategy is simply to decide along political party lines.

The Pew Research Center overwhelmingly found that to be very common in a 2020 analysis of survey data from its Americans Trend Panel, collected from 11,929 adult Americans.

Only 4 percent of registered voters intended to choose a congressional House or Senate candidate belonging to a political party which differed from their chosen presidential choice. A Pew graph caption succinctly concludes, “Split-ticket voting appears to be relatively rare in 2020.”

Midterm elections in 2022 reflected similar voting behavior as the Pew Center widened its lookback period, incorporating results from the 2016 presidential race. Comparing presidential candidate choices in 2020 with congressional House races in 2022, “just 6% of voters crossed party lines between elections or voted for third-party candidates in either election.”

This ease of voting along party lines inherently places a lot of faith into the political party machine to screen candidates and, presumably, so do election primary cycles which may make the general election into more of a formality. Democrats cannot vote in Republican primaries and vice versa, solidifying loyalty to a specific candidate long before the first Tuesday in November.

Of course, the general election results are hardly preordained or a mere foregone conclusion. That voting power remains yours alone to brandish at your designated polling place.

Unless there’s an uncontested race, that’s true whether you’ll stand there temporarily walled behind a dusty, clandestine curtain or within a foldable cardboard privacy shield evoking what’s used in middle school classrooms to deter wandering eyes during a vocabulary test.

Next week, how will you decide? Maybe you’ve attended some local political rallies in your zeal to become more informed and democratically engaged. Perhaps you’ll vote along party lines after doing your fair share of homework, researching news reports and candidate speeches.

Then again, in an election cycle rampant with cross-party endorsements on both sides, you might join that single-digit voting group which historically does not embrace a straight party ticket.

In our shared present reality, extant at as you read these very words, you may have struggled lately to know which news information to trust as our society steps beyond the decades-long Computer Age into a rapidly shifting and less tangible Imagination Age. After all, the vehicles of a free press have dramatically evolved since the First Amendment’s ratification in 1791.

That mixed and bittersweet legacy of the “fourth estate” ostensibly endures amidst recent disputes about whether media platforms espouse “fake news” or truly are “fair and balanced.”

Battles for voting rights, past or present, don’t resolve any inner struggles to decide which may even spill out into more overt verbal debates with coworkers or members of your own family. 

Are spoken or written words stronger? Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. had strong views about that after publishing a potent poetic tribute to “Old Ironsides” in 1830. Those words sparked such a feisty public outcry, that the United States Navy permanently cancelled plans to decommission the U.S.S. Constitution; the frigate is still moored in the Charlestown Navy Yard today.

Despite an unprecedented impact from what he’d written, Holmes ultimately preferred the power of conversation over reading all about it. Making his emphatic case for the virtues of spoken words, Holmes noted, “There is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us; the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls pebbles on the shore.”

On the other hand, he asserted that words seen instead of heard were unpredictable wildcards given that “writing or printing is like shooting a rifle; you may hit your reader’s mind or miss it.”

With only one week to go before the Election Day, Shel Silverstein is another poet worth mentioning. He pointed the way to where the sidewalk ends but also wrote “The Voice,” long before one show’s competitive battle of creative acts ever premiered on American television.

Originally intended for kids, the poem’s words speak to adults, too, about a skill taking practice, time and a different kind of talent to have enough courage to do: “No teacher, preacher, parent, friend/ or wise man can decide what’s right for you/ just listen to/ that voice that speaks inside.”

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Author: Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from NYU, Jason Bowns earned his Master in Public Administration from John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Inspector General program. A certified social studies teacher, Bowns worked in many K-12 education settings until matriculating into a public policy doctoral program last year. He’s particularly interested in policy narratives, law enforcement efficiency, and public service motivation. Contact him at [email protected].

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