The latest U.S. Census lists the voting age population of Niles as approximately 25,000. Of that 25,000, some 19,000 are registered to vote. Of those registered voters, a little more than 4,000 voted for the mayor and trustees in this year's election. This means that around seventeen percent of the voting age population decided who will be running our Village for the next four years. The remaining eighty three percent of the residents of Niles who did not vote are apparently OK with this arrangement, which profoundly disturbs me. Imagine, if you were in a freshman high school English class of 25 students and only four of those students decided who your teachers will be from your first day of class until you gradate. Then imagine that the remaining 21 students were so apathetic that they just didn't care. What a sad class. This past year we have seen how contentious board meetings result in an inability to resolve issues and run the Village effectively. We have also seen how board members who do not work as a team often result in board meetings peppered with embarrassing bickering and petty in-fighting by people who would otherwise be normal reasonable adults. As any of you have have read my previous blogs can probably figure out, I am satisfied with the results of our election and I am looking forward to a more unified and focused Board. However, all the residents who didn't vote should not be so comfortable. I am not the be all and end all of political wisdom and neither are the other four thousand who decided the make up of the Village Board. Maybe we voted for our friends, maybe we voted for emotional reasons, maybe we voted straight tickets without regard to the individual candidates on the ticket, maybe we had personal grudges or were looking for personal gains, maybe we just made a mistake. Maybe, just maybe everyone should have voiced their opinion on who runs our town and maybe the results would have been the same, but maybe they would have been different. We will never know. I hope that our next election will see a more engaged voter turnout and a true representation of our residents to decide the future of our town. "Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting," said Franklin D. Roosevelt. The President was undoubtably speaking about our entire nation, but his words equally apply to our own little slice of America called Niles. Freedom starts at home. Let's all work on keeping it alive right here.
