Charita Goshay: Voting is the least we can do to preserve, protect democracy

If you do nothing else on Nov. 7, cast your vote.

It might be hard to believe, but there are people who have a vested interest in your not voting because, as far as they're concerned, the less input the better.

So, read, think and vote, not according to what someone says on TV, talk radio, Facebook, or even your family, but according to your own conscience.

Always keep in mind that if voting wasn't important, there wouldn't be efforts afoot to make it more difficult. Some will tell you that it's being done to preserve integrity but history tells us that the villains and cheaters have never been ordinary Americans — who learn how win and lose in kindergarten — but those whose desire for power leads them to threaten the very rights they claim to be protecting.

Use your right: Vote to save your democracy

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous is apathy.

Not voting is in essence, a vote. It's a way of saying that you don't really care what happens and who gets to decide.

The problem with apathy, of course, is that sooner or later, decisions made without our input always circle back around to bite us in the rear.

If you don't care who gets in office, you don't have a right to complain when those same people raise your property taxes and ignore your neighborhood.

If you don't want to help decide who sits on your child's school board, don't be shocked when that same board makes changes in curricula or athletics with the assumption that your silence means you'll be OK with it.

Apathy feeds other harmful developments, such as gerrymandering. Such skewed and cynical politics is a threat to democracy because it cheats us out of authentically representative government.

Gerrymandering damages democracy because uncontested power is never satisfied. Merely winning a lopsided election is never enough. Eventually there will be a book that needs to be banned, a law that needs to be passed to benefit a chosen few, a group which needs to be oppressed.

It is insidious because it removes consequence, which is the foundational power of the election process. As the economist Thomas Sowell puts it:

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

At some point, it won't even matter to gerrymandered officeholders what their own supporters want because public service isn't the goal — it's power.

Every election, no matter how minor, shapes and redefines who we are. This year, in addition to local elections, Ohio voters have decisions to make regarding recreational marijuana and abortion rights, the latter being proposed in response to an election of a Republican president who was able to appoint three conservative Supreme Court justices who in turn, overturned Roe v. Wade.

If ever there was a perfect illustration of how much elections matter, it is this one:

Voting matters because it is the best, most direct way we can make our wishes known. There are places in the world where people would give anything to be able to determine their own destiny.

Voting matters because it is the one way in which we can preserve and strengthen an increasingly fragile democracy, all without firing a shot.

It literally is the least we can do.

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Charita Goshay: Voting is the least we can do to preserve democracy