To Vote or Not to Vote: There is No Try

By Jack Corby

Posted: January 13th, 2020. Edited: January 15th, 2020.

Ring. Ring. Ring goes my cell phone. I sit in an awkward, thrown together store front, fixed with folding chairs, makeshift desks, stacks and stacks of boxes, and loads of green ‘Iowa for Amy’ placards. The walls are hunter green and the store front sits next door to the VA of Des Moines. This is Amy Klobuchar’s Des Moines headquarters. It is 11am on a very cold, Iowa morning and I am working my way through a call sheet, trying to reach as many people as I can and hope I can persuade them to vote for Amy Klobuchar. Or, as I would soon understand, to just vote at all.  

Noah Stewart, the Des Moines Field Organizer, sits across from me, tapping away at his keys as he builds a ‘walkmap’, or basically a map of area that canvassers will canvass. The goal is to build a map of 47-53 doors into the same map, trying to group by like residences, like all single family homes, and keep distance walked as low as possible. It may sound easy, but once one map is built, the others become harder and harder to manufacture, making the task more and more daunting as you get into it.

As I start back on my call sheet with the Gs and Hs of Polk County, the county that houses Des Moines, I hit a voice that shocks me. On the other line, a woman tells me that she does not wish to talk to me, another “annoying caller” and that me calling will not change her mind on the caucus. She has lived in Iowa for 28 years, since finishing college, and has never once caucused. She even got mad at me that I would dare to suggest to her that she caucus, something she saw ‘no point’ in doing as “it does not really elect the new president”. I was baffled. How could someone ignore a call to duty like this? While she was correct, the caucus does not directly pick the next candidate or president, Iowa is a huge power shifter and can propelled candidates to do well down the road, just as Obama had done in 2008. And most Iowans I have met take great pride in the fact that Iowa is the first, and main, caucus.

As the conversation ended and I looked down at the call sheet, waiting for my hand to mark ‘refused’ on my sheet, I was just amazed. But, not just at the voice on the other line, rather that I played into stereotypes, something I was always taught not to do. I assumed because this person lived in Iowa and was older, as the sheet noted, that they would be gung-ho about voting and expressing their opinion and making a difference. It shocked me when that did not happen.

Looking back on the conversation, I realized it was much of my own bias, as outlined in one of the Global Learning Goals we looked at before we left Elon. I am very politically engaged. I love politics and love discussing it. I have grown up in a city that is fueled by the federal government and the ideologies that surround it. My high school was basically a funeral home on November 9^th, 2016. Politics has shaped my world and my mindset, for better or for worse.

When evaluating myself after that situation, I realize now, more than ever, that not a lot of people have the political freedom I have. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to not only vote how they want, as I do, but that they can even get to the polls on election day, for a number of different reasons. Or even have the technology to request an absentee ballot, if they need one. Or even know that they need an absentee ballot. Or even have the education to make a sound, educated vote. Or what checking each different box means for not only them, but for their community.

This short, 28 second phone call really opened my eyes to things I knew existed but had never personally experienced in my hometown of Washington DC or my college town of Elon. Voting is a right that all Americans over the age of 18 have. But, they also have a right NOT to vote. People can choose just as well to stay home in November and let the world pass them by, if they choose. It is their right as Americans and one that must be respected. And I am glad for the person on the other line for making that choice, even if I disagree with it.