Dear Editor:
They say reading is fundamental. You know what else is fundamental? Voting. For decades, the political parties on both sides have found more and more clever ways to disenfranchise the kind of voters they don’t want showing up at the polls.
Whether through gerrymandering, complicated registration processes and obscure, ever-changing deadlines, electioneering at the polling stations or outright voter intimidation, there are so many ways to ensure only your party insiders are pulling that lever. This is especially true for primaries. It’s now 2020 and this COVID-19 pandemic crisis has presented a unique opportunity for New Jersey, the mail-in ballot. Will Governor Phil Murphy pull that lever?
May 12 was New Jersey’s first all-vote-by-mail election and it was a success! Turnout is already much higher in many places. By the morning of May 12, Teaneck had already reported 3,000 more votes than in 2016! Over in Montclair, they saw an increase of 310 percent increase over 2016! In Nutley, it was a whopping 34 percent! More voters than ever cast their vote for local democracy and despite what many of us already knew, now it’s crystal clear that vote-by-mail turns out more voters.
Why should Governor Murphy bend to the will of the local party organizations’ calls for forced in-person elections, potentially endangering millions of lives? What does it mean when the Hudson County chair of the Democratic Party says “it’s not in our culture?” Who’s your culture, because last I checked mine was anyone over 18 years old that’s registered to vote. Thank God for automatic voter registration, NJ!
Voting by mail is also cheaper! Our municipalities all over NJ (and we have 565 of them) no longer need to staff polling places with poll workers, potentially endangering their lives over 14 hour shifts, and use insecure, hackable electronic voting machines and a questionable chain of command. In fact, a 2016 study of Colorado from the Pew Charitable Trusts showed that there was an average 40 percent savings (where cost data was available.) Some of NJ’s vote-counting machines can be super fast, many counting as many as 40,000 ballots per hour. How much would NJ save? How about how many lives?
At a time when so much is at stake – climate change resiliency, dried up budgets from the pandemic crisis, and despair among an isolated electorate, fewer quality green spaces in the most at-risk neighborhoods – we need democracy for more people, more than ever.
In Hudson County, only 7 percent of the votes cast in 2019 were vote-by-mail, vs double digits almost everywhere else in NJ. Compare that to 50 percent in Camden County. Is it because voters here don’t know how easy and convenient is it to cast your vote this way? Or is it more sinister; are voters purposely not encouraged to sign up for vote-by-mail? Let’s change that, Hudson County. Let’s excite people around our enormous privilege of voting for the candidate you believe in, not the Column X “Team”.
Roger Quesasda
