On April 7, Dartmouth residents headed to the polls for a town election. Among other bureaucratic positions and ballot questions, voters got to choose the newest member of the select board. As we are a town, not a city with a mayor, the Select Board is Dartmouth’s executive body. The five members propose the town budget each year, as well as enforce our municipal policies. To vote for your preferred candidate is to take part in forging our town’s future.
There are 25,643 registered voters in Dartmouth. On April 7, just 2,959 of them voted.
Yes. A mere 11.53 percent—which, admittedly, is up from last year’s 2.5 percent, so we can pat ourselves on the back. But I’m not here to scold. There are dozens of reasons people can’t or don’t vote. Their boss may have refused to give them time off, or they couldn’t find transportation or childcare. Perhaps they weren’t even aware elections were happening. Local elections have always been undervalued in the US. Voters have to actively seek out information about them, whereas national elections are impossible to escape. Presidential races are like Christmas: they seem to start earlier every year, are absolutely exhausting, and cost an ungodly amount of money (thanks, Citizens United).
Consequently, we unconsciously develop the belief that the presidential election is the most important of them all. But, once the hoopla dies down, our ballot tends to culminate in anticlimax. The old boss is often the same as the new boss, in the words of The Who; our daily lives under the new administration grow marginally worse, if they change at all. So why bother to vote every four years if it doesn’t seem to do anything?
This cycle is part of the reason our country’s perceived political effectiveness has taken a hit. According to a March report from Democracy for All Project, only 31 percent of Americans believe ordinary citizens have “some” power “to create change in our nation,” while twenty-four percent feel they have “very little.” This sense of helplessness is more acute in young Americans aged 18 to 29. Fifty percent agree that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does,” according to the Harvard Institute of Politics’ Youth Poll from this spring.
The reality is every citizen has the power to create change, no matter how trite the statement has become. But that power is most fully realized in local elections.
Let’s use myself as a case study. For the uninitiated, I’m a teenage girl attending public high school in Massachusetts. If I moved to Alabama, I’d still be an American citizen living under the same president. But the quality of my education—and, therefore, the opportunities available to me—would be vastly different. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Alabama spends an average of $13,500 per pupil, whereas Massachusetts spends $26,000.
In the event that I would ever need an abortion, I would only have to drive 46 minutes up to Attleboro. Meanwhile, Alabama has a statewide total abortion ban; to undergo a procedure for up to 20-26 weeks, as the law is in Massachusetts, I’d have to travel to Illinois.
The journey up to Attleboro, however, will be much bumpier. Only 29 percent of Alabama’s roads are in poor or fair condition, as reported by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Massachusetts? Forty-nine percent.
Now, of course there’s nuance to these facts. They reflect differences in both states’ history, values, climate, average income, population size, and ethnic makeup. Nor are they universal across the state; policies differ from town to town. But that’s precisely why we have subnational governments: to address Americans’ specialized needs in a way the federal government cannot. The US is a massive country, in terms of land size and population. Thus, heaven is high and the emperor is far away, leaving state legislatures, school boards, and select boards to decide where to invest our tax dollars and federal funds.
We experience the impact of local policies more immediately and directly compared to the crawl of national laws. It no longer feels like you’re voting into the void when your ballot produces a tangible return on investment, like a paved road on your morning commute or a pristine, updated textbook in your backpack.
Oftentimes, successful policies don’t stay within town boundaries; they serve as models for neighboring municipalities before ultimately becoming the national standard. In 2003, Needham, Massachusetts passed a law criminalizing the sale of tobacco to anyone under 21 years of age. Sixteen years later, President Donald Trump signed a federal law to raise the minimum age of sale nationwide. Your vote in a local election can, in fact, change your country.
But don’t walk away with the impression that your vote is magic. New York City residents are experiencing a quick turnaround with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but the unfortunate truth is that, in this day and age, a politician as vigorous as him is a rare phenomenon. Nor does the perfect politician, whose policies reflect all of your values to an exact T, exist. It’s up to us constituents to convince them to support certain issues—particularly by threatening not to reelect them otherwise. To use a John Oliver quote that has stuck with me: “Elections alone aren’t sufficient for large-scale change, but they’re absolutely necessary for it to ever happen, because it’s the day when you essentially get to choose who you’d prefer to be pushing for the next four years and where you’ll be pushing them from.”
I was one of the 2,959 Dartmouth residents who voted in the select board election. It was the first vote I ever cast, as I turned 18 in January. I was thrilled. In my head, it seemed all the pushing I had done in middle and high school—meeting with state legislators, speaking in front of the select board, canvassing for candidates, subjecting my school community to tedious articles—finally mattered, because I could cap it off with a vote. However, both voting and civic engagement are equally essential to progress. I theorize that political helplessness intensifies when citizens head to their polling place in November, cast their ballot, and consider their civic duty done for the next four years. They don’t fight, they don’t push, to supplement their vote.
Widespread change in general is never quick. To take effect, it requires years, decades, perhaps centuries of persistence from politicians, yes, but mainly dedicated activists and everyday citizens. As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
To begin, you can vote in your next local election. The George Washington University’s TurboVote website is an excellent resource. There, you can sign up to receive reminders about your upcoming elections, check your voter registration, request an absentee ballot, and learn what ballot questions you’ll be faced with in the voting booth. To remain informed about the candidates and the issues at stake, you can read (and support) local newspapers, such as the Dartmouth Week, The New Bedford Light, and, obviously the finest of them all, The Spectrum.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my years of pushing, it’s that taking action is the only productive way to deal with anxiety about the future. And how valuable it is to have the microcosm of a state, a town, or even a school, where the movers and shakers live in your own neighborhood, where the mountaintop isn’t so far away, where you can see the results of your actions. Systemic problems seem insurmountable when we look at them from a national or global scale, but if we don’t try to fight for solutions in our own town, how can we ever fight for a whole country?
