Preparing for State Primary Election Day

Pericles, a politician of Ancient Greece, is credited with coining the word “democracy” in 430 B.C.

Nate Barksdale explains on history.com, “It is probable that the Athenians were not the first group of people to adopt such a system (a few places in India have traditions of local democracy that claim earlier origins) but because the Greeks named it, they have a good claim at being the ‘first’ democracy.”

The Greeks’ earliest system of democracy relied on pebbles.

“The Ancient Greeks used pebbles to cast their votes – apparently depositing a small stone into one of two urns to mark their choice,” explained Lorna Shaddick, a broadcast journalist at Feature Story News. “After the vote had taken place, the contents of the urns were emptied and counted – but of course, all pebbles looking pretty much alike, nobody could tell whose was whose, preserving the principle of secret voting.”

The Greek word “psephos”, meaning pebble, was considered in the naming of psephology, the modern discipline involving the study of elections and voting trends.

Psephologists note that over time, some countries with democratic governments do not consistently recognize the importance of democracy.

This idea is supported by declining voting statistics: according to the United States Census, 42 percent of citizens voted in 2014. This statistic was down from 46 percent in 2010 and down further from 48 percent in 2006.

While voting is a well-known characteristic of democracy, it is not voluntary across the globe. 22 countries around the world have implemented a system known as “compulsory voting” in which citizens of the proper age are required to vote, or alternatively face penalties of fines or community service.

The Central Intelligence Agency reports about 381 million people are among compulsory voters, in countries such as Mexico, Australia, Greece, or nearly all South American countries.

By comparison, Who Rules Where, an online forum dedicated to the discussion of world politics, explains that in 2014 about 80 million people, roughly two percent of the world’s population, were denied the opportunity to vote at all.

Citizens of several countries are not permitted to participate in elections, including Brunei, the Vatican, South Sudan, and Eritrea.

Who Rules Where explains, “Qatar does have local elections, but only 30,000 [of two million] people within a specially selected electoral college are eligible to vote in them.”

The United Arab Emirates functions similarly.

Other non-voting citizens include “some religious and ethnic groups… felons in the U.S…. some prisoners in the U.K., China, and Portugal… and some nonresidents.”

Fairness is not always synonymous with democracy. Who Rules Where says, “Of course many of those people who can vote are voting in elections which are rigged, elections which are a sham, elections for powerless figurehead or fig-leaf bodies, elections at a local level only, or elections in which government heavies and the state manipulated media will guarantee the result.”

In reflecting upon the conditions the rest of the world faces, a democratic government in which citizens are granted the choice to vote seems very opportunistic.

Since the time of the Ancient Greeks and the development of many different types of democracies, many people believe that the choice to vote is not one that should be ignored.

“Voting is among our most fundamental domestic responsibilities and important civic opportunities,” believes Thom File, sociologist in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Education and Social Stratification Branch. “Without free and open elections, American democracy would not exist.”

Thomas Paine, political activist, theorist, and author during the Revolutionary War describes a similar mentality: “The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives in this case.”

With State Primary Election day on Tuesday, Aug. 2, it’s important to consider the privilege that is voting.

To conclude with the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”