Leaving Ohio

Leaving Ohio, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Tuesday, October 8th, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday – 78,930
Miles travelled today – 450

7:28 pm – Somewhere between Columbus and Chicago – Goodbye Ohio, hello Illinois! Goodbye Columbus, hello Chicago! Goodbye Bengals and Hello Bears! We are off to the land of endlessly disappointing baseball, impossibly tall skyscrapers, and eight-month winters.

The Ohio registration deadline was yesterday, and while early voting runs on up through election day, we are leaving Ohio and heading on to the Windy city (named for long-winded politicians not wind, though both are there). Tonight we will take the mother ship to The House of Blues for a concert with Nelly. The second phase of this tour has begun. We are still registering voters in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and several other states whose deadlines have not yet passed. But now we are beginning to concentrate on getting young voters out to the polls, a pretty substantial task in its own right. And, obviously, our primary purpose as an organization.

Which brings up a point: while we are a nonpartisan organization, we are not an indifferent one. There is nobody on this tour who does not have fierce political convictions of his own. We don’t all agree, but we do care. I mention this because with the coming of registration deadlines comes a slight change in our mindset. Before, we were seeking to expand the pool of available young voters. We were fighting against the complications of bureaucracy that prevent eligible people from voting. If anything it was an educational mission. We were trying to help young people understand the paperwork behind the process. Now we begin to shift towards a mission of motivation. If we were fighting against complication before, now we are fighting against apathy. Fight may not be the best word. Among the youngsters in this election, voting has become hip. Nine times out of ten, you ask one of us if we’re making it out on November 4th and the response is ‘Hell Yeah I’m voting.’

But there are the exceptions. There are potential voters, and we have met more than a few, who don’t vote because they are actually against the process of voting. Some are Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are forbidden from voting by their faith, and some are that ever present contingent of hermits, cranks, and cantankerous backwoods crazies who simply object to anything that shows support for our government. And then there are still the few – and they truly are few – among our generation who are just lazy. The most common expression of this laziness is the line “I don’t really know enough about the issues to pick one candidate over the other.” That may well be, but anyone with an internet connection or access to printed material can find out which candidate he or she thinks is right with a relatively small amount of research. And honestly, there is no voter who knows as much as he should, no politico who can see which candidate will better deal with our future. So you make your best guess. I have my own reasons for voting, but they are hardly more relevant that the millions of others out there. And – in a shameless plug for a good organization – you can fight this apathy and offer your own reasons to vote at amillionreasonstovote.com.

– WRITTEN BY NICK BROWN

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Rock the Vote Bio: Rock the Vote was founded in 1990 to organize artists and fight against censorship of musicians. Since then we've evolved to focus on empowering young people to get involved in the political process. We use pop culture, peer-to-peer organizing, and the latest technology to raise visibility of politics and demystify the process of registering to vote. @rockthevote Email the author at: blog(at)rockthevote.com

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