Tuesday is Election Day, put it on your schedule

This is that day when we bang our biggest drums to encourage Valley voters to make their way to the polls on Tuesday and fulfill their civic duty to vote.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten that our local elections this year are sandwiched between the year’s meatier primary and general elections. But on Tuesday we will go to the polls to pick new city council, Mat-Su Borough Assembly and School Board representatives.

These local elections often draw the lowest number of voters; many races are routinely decided by just a few hundred votes. Houston races can turn on less than a dozen ballots.

During the primary election we used this space to again lament poor voter turnout and asked readers to share their ideas for ways to get more of us to the polls for each election.

As with voter turnout itself, reader response was predictably low. We say special thanks here to readers who shared their time and ideas with us.

Mark Vingoe, for example, says if people won’t come to the voting booth, let’s take it to them.

“Have volunteers canvass the neighborhoods. I am retired and would certainly do this,” Vingoe writes. “Allow us to bring voting materials, ballots, voting registrars and whatever else is needed to vote and walk or drive through neighborhoods.”

Stuart Thompson had so many suggestions we printed his reply in two parts. He says the key problems are entrenched corruption of the two-party system; irresponsible and selfish characters of too many people; and ignorance. He offers five ideas for redress. Read his columns online at bit.ly/1rJ7SDJ and bit.ly/Z2KpTV.

Thompson concludes his screed this way:

“Fellow citizens, there is no greater enemy to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than the political cowardice we are now wallowing in. We must find courage to better educate ourselves on the tools each of us must use to make freedom truly mean something.”

We have another chance on Tuesday to, as Thompson says, “make freedom truly mean something.” When we say our soldiers fought and died on foreign soil for our freedoms, surely we count among our treasured “freedoms” the freedom to vote for those who govern on our behalf.

Voting is our responsibility and our right. It is a tangible way we can demonstrate that we do value the service and sacrifice of our service members, that we do value our freedom.

During the August primary, total voter turnout statewide was about 39 percent. Right now, “apathy” is our biggest voting bloc.

When we stay home on Election Day it means everyone else’s vote counts a little more, their voices are heard a little clearer, their interests represented a bit more stridently than ours. It means that a small group of like-minded voters — like a mid-sized church congregation — can vote their will at the ballot box and the rest of us must accept their choice. Or, we can fulfill our civic duty and make voting on Tuesday our top priority.

The men and women on the ballot Tuesday sit on our school board, assembly and city councils and are at the very heart of the notion of local control. This group of decision-makers has a lot of impact on our daily lives — their votes build roads, fund education and set local property tax rates.

This is not the stuff of Rs and Ds, or red and blue states. This election is about the day-to-day stuff like keeping roads clear of ice and snow and deciding how close is too close to build a cellphone tower near your home.

Let’s all do our part by educating ourselves about the issues, then voting on Tuesday.