Had I not voted today, my vote probably wouldn’t have been missed in the grand scheme. Sadly, there seem to be a great many folks who probably don’t vote because of that “my vote doesn’t really matter” mindset. It is true that one vote among many doesn’t matter much, assuming a wide margin. It is exceedingly true, though, that a country full of people with that mindset won’t have much of an election. The relative few who do vote will determine who is in charge.

I won’t claim that the upcoming figures are exact, but it looks as if only 26% of West Virginia’s population voted. A minority of people decided what is right for the majority. Granted that in the statistical world a random sample of sufficient size yields an accurate result. Assuming the votes were counted correctly, the roughly 418,000 votes cast in West Virginia yield an error of just +/- 0.1%. That is assuming, of course, that the views of the sample represent the views of the whole. They may not.

So the question I’d like to ask is, “What the hell happened to the other 74% of you?” Was it too much to ask for you to take ten minutes to go vote? Couldn’t get to a polling place, you say? Well you can vote early, but you do have to go to the courthouse. Well, alright, I see your point. But “I just don’t care” isn’t an excuse that’ll fly with me. You care. You complain about Iraq, you’ve certainly got feelings on terrorism, and you certainly have a stance on gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research. If you didn’t go vote, don’t expect me to listen to you complain about the way your representative at whichever level of government is handling it. You had your chance.

Honestly, though, I can see where it would be difficult to get to your polling place. For the last 220 years, we have had to make sure people vote at their designated polling place simply because we couldn’t tell if they had voted somewhere else previously. With the advent of the internet being available practically everywhere, there is no reason that we shouldn’t be able to vote at any polling place, whether it be your local school, the fire station two blocks away, or the hotdog cart outside your office at lunchtime. I’m not just talking locally, either. This should be a nationwide system. For that matter, it should be worldwide. If you’re out of the country on election day, you ought to take a quick trip to the US Embassy, show your ID and cast your ballot.

I heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered about the election in Nicaragua. Toward the end of the story, there was an interview of former President Jimmy Carter. The Carter Center acts as a thrid party to monitor elections in developing or unstable democracies to make sure they’re fair. When asked about upcoming US elections, Carter had this to say:

“It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by the Carter Center in observing. We require for instance that there be uniform voting procedures throughout an entire nation. In the United States you’ve got not only fragmented from one state to another but also from one county to another.”

Wow. That’s not a bit damning at all. Check out the story, though. It’s interesting, especially President Carter’s comments. And go vote next time you can.