Vote like your future depends on it

On Friday, we’d like to print a story about how one polling place in the Mat-Su Valley stayed open a few minutes past the 8 p.m. cutoff so the last person who hadn’t voted yet could add his or her choices to the tally.

Can you imagine how things would be different if we had 100 percent turnout? 90 percent? 80 percent? 70 percent? In 2010, we didn’t even reach 40 percent turnout in the primary election.

Polling places are prepared with ballots for 65 percent of us to show up, but even that scenario isn’t likely.

Why? Because generally in Alaska and the U.S., most people don’t vote. Pick any race in Alaska and chances are good that among eligible voters, most don’t.

If you are eligible to vote, you have a responsibility to do so. Every time you don’t fulfill your duty at the polls, you cede your power to someone else — someone who doesn’t know you and whose interests and points of view may be vastly different from yours.

Before every election we write some form of this plea to voters to do their duty. We’d be surprised — pleasantly — to learn that what we write here urged our neighbors to the polls. Still, we feel a duty to bang our “go vote” drum.

Although people are statistically more likely to vote in elections involving national candidates for offices such as senator or president, each person’s vote matters most at home.

Especially during the presidential election in November, showing up at the polls is our duty, but the electoral college has a greater say in picking the nation’s next president than anyone in Alaska.

We’ve seen it happen repeatedly at the local level where a handful of votes can change the outcome of an election. At work here as well is the unseen hand of the nonvoter who carefully through indifference to duty allows others to usurp their votes, their voices. Come Wednesday, most of us will have chosen membership in this do-nothing party.

At the state and local level, it is popular to say Alaska is open for business. Even some campaign ads laud candidates as willing to restore Alaska as open for business.

Here in the Mat-Su Valley, we’ve had an unpleasant serving of what open for business means in practice: the Mat-Su Borough Assembly — a body that is as open as open can be for business — removed all rules for tall towers built in the Mat-Su Borough in November 2011. Now some three-dozen towers are under construction in the borough without any requirements for permits, rules or public comment.

Voting locally matters. Here at home is where our voices are loudest. Vote today. It’s your duty. It’s your privilege. Vote like your future depends on it.