At 7 p.m. today, the polls for the Texas gubernatorial primaries will close and while you shouldn’t have waited until the last minute, your voices still have a few hours to be heard. The Daily Cougar has formally endorsed Republican Debra Medina and Democrat Bill White, but we believe voting — regardless of whom it is for — is an important aspect of American citizenship.
If you’ve had time to update your Facebook status or tweet, you can find time to vote. But if you decide not to, for whatever reason, don’t complain about the outcome — even if Gov. Rick Perry wins the Republican primary, grows bat wings, bares fangs and shoots lasers from his eyes to destroy the Houston skyline — because you didn’t care enough to give your opinion.
Young people care, right? The voter turnout for 18 to 29-year-olds in the 2008 presidential election was the second largest in American history. According to Carnegie Mellon’s The Tartan, between 22 and 24 million young Americans voted. According to an exit poll analysis by CIRCLE, a nonpartisan research center, the voter turnout of all eligible voters was between 49.3 and 54.5 percent.
But that was a national election. The turnout for Houston’s mayoral election was only 16.5 percent. That’s embarrassing.
But we don’t care, do we? We’re too busy to do our civic duty — yes, duty. Although it’s a privilege, we should feel compelled to do it — and it’s really inconvenient that we can’t cast our votes via the Internet.
One of these days, maybe you’ll be able to do just that. In the meantime, the polls aren’t that far away.
If you like this city, vote to keep the things you love. If you can’t stand it, vote for change. Or if you’re somewhere in the middle like most of us (pleased, but opportunistic and constructively critical), do some research and make a well-informed decision. You’ll be one of a select few.
If you don’t vote in a probable runoff between Perry and U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary, do yourself, your family, friends and fellow Houstonians a favor and cast a ballot in the Nov. 2 general election.
