Please vote

It amazes me and makes me so sad when people do not vote. Yes, one vote makes a difference. In our county commissioner primary, the winner was chosen by one vote. That race is as local as it gets.

When I was old enough to vote, I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. It took some planning ahead, but voting is vital. I had to request an absentee ballot from my county auditor back in South Dakota. When it arrived in the mail, I took it to the American Embassy to open the envelope and place my vote. The embassy personnel were used to verifying ballots for elections so the process was simple. I had my passport for identification. We opened the envelope containing the ballot, they checked my ID, I voted and they stamped it so it was official. It went into one of their courier bags which they transported to the U.S., and my ballot was mailed stateside. The election for president that year was between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. Although McGovern was from South Dakota, the only state he carried was Massachusetts. That was definitely a landslide.

Years later, after politics, McGovern and his wife owned the Stratford Inn in Connecticut. Once he was in business, he saw the difficulties of it. A big part of his headaches were the onerous mandates, regulations and taxes that were heaped upon small business owners. These were laws that McGovern pushed through and at the least, voted for, when he was in the Senate. The inn went bankrupt in four short years.

In a 1992 article for the Wall Street Journal titled, “A Politician’s Dream is a Businessman’s Nightmare,” excerpted due to length, McGovern wrote, “I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator. My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never have doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: “Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape?”

One segment of Congress still does not understand that when companies are handed rules that cost the company money, the costs are handed down to consumers. McGovern learned this and tried to educate, yet it has still not sunk in.

All is all, voting is the chance for individuals to have their say and to get leaders into office who understand economics and reality. In other words, your vote matters.

Sanders is a national-award winning columnist who writes from the farm in southwest South Dakota. Her internet latchstring is always out at [email protected]. She can be reached through her website at http://www.peggysanders.com.