Don’t shirk your responsibility - vote

With all the talk about voting in our national election, we tend to forget that there are local elections and referendums which need to be voted on in a thoughtful manner.

Most presidential elections pull only between 50 percent to 60 percent of people eligible to vote to the polls, and there is a much smaller turnout for elections between the presidential election and local elections and referendums. Yet those local issues affect us much more directly than the presidential elections.

I would encourage our citizens to take their right to vote seriously. Have you really read the referendum that is on the ballot for Horry County? You only have to go to SCVotes.org to get it and review it. You can also get your sample ballot at that website; there are a number of other positions on the ballot.

Forget Facebook and other internet sites and blogs spewing inaccurate information. Instead, take the time to check out reliable non-partisan websites for your information. And also remember that opinion pieces and editorials are just that -- opinions of others and not necessarily facts. Get the facts then go and vote.

Vote on the issues, not the personalities. If we could get 90 percent plus of our electorate to the polls, our elected officials would listen. Until that happens, everyone in this country loses. We are where we are today because of our lack of effort to take our voting privileges seriously.

We ignore facts for the excitement of the race at the moment, forgetting that those “moments” will turn into a number of years where our country moves and functions effectively or not over the longer term. We only have ourselves to blame.

Voting is a right and a privilege - but it is also a responsibility. Vote. Our democracy depends on it.

The writer lives in Murrells Inlet.

This story was originally published November 4, 2016 at 5:17 PM with the headline "Don’t shirk your responsibility - vote."