Dispatch from Columbus. November 3, 2023.
Editorial: Election Day Decision: Participate or Disconnect?
Tuesday is election day for county, district and state offices in Mississippi. Contrary to what we often hear, 100% of eligible voters will participate in this election.
Many voters will fulfill their civic duty by going to the polls and making their choices. Many others will make a different choice: not to vote.
So really, it’s about voter turnout and voter exclusion. Each of us will fall into one camp or the other. We invite everyone to participate in the demonstration.
Political cartoons
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To those who are inclined to be uninterested in politics, we invite you to consider the words of the Greek statesman Pericles more than 2,500 years ago: “It is not because you do not you are not interested in politics that politics will not be interested in it. You.”
The people chosen through our electoral process can and do have a direct influence on our lives. Understanding this, who wouldn’t want to have a say in the matter?
Mid-20th century education reformer John Dewey described the importance of voting with a simple metaphor: “The man who wears the shoe knows better than anyone what it pinches and where it pinches, even whether the expert shoemaker is the best judge of the extent of the problem. be repaired. »
Expanding the metaphor, if and where the problem lies are the problems and issues that actually affect us, as opposed to campaign rhetoric designed primarily to divert attention or inflame passions.
The purpose of elections is to identify the real problems (where the problem lies) and to choose the candidates who recognize these problems and are best prepared to solve them (the expert shoemakers).
When you choose not to vote, you are saying that the issues you care about don’t matter. Your absence at the polls hurts all of us who struggle with these same issues. After all, there is power in numbers.
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who don’t vote,” George Jean Nathan, the magazine’s editor and critic, said years ago.
So, if you are among the registered voters who may have chosen not to participate in this election, we invite you to reconsider your decision, not only for your benefit, but for the benefit of all of us.
In the few days leading up to the election, we encourage readers to familiarize themselves with the candidates, especially local candidates whose outreach efforts may be limited. A good way to do this is to check out updated versions of The Dispatch’s voter guides, which you can access by going to cdispatch.com/eedition, scroll to the special sections and then click on the “Columbus General Election 2023 Voter’s Guide” or “Starkville General Election Voter’s Guide” link. We’ve updated the guides to only include local candidates running in the general election.
Sample ballots will appear in Saturday’s print edition.
Commonwealth of Greenwood. November 3, 2023.
Editorial: A GOP slate with a hesitation
Most of the attention in the state of Mississippi for next week’s general election has been directed to the gubernatorial race between Tate Reeves, the Republican incumbent, and his Democratic challenger, Brandon Presley.
There are, however, seven other statewide contests on the ballot. Unlike some previous elections, in which Democrats didn’t even bother to field a candidate for each election, this time around, all seven Republican incumbents have Democratic opponents, even though the majority of challengers led symbolic campaigns.
We recommend voting for the seven Republican incumbents: Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann, Secretary of State Michael Watson, Attorney General Lynn Fitch, State Auditor Shad White, Treasurer David McRae, Commissioner of State Agriculture Andy Gipson and Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney.
All have mostly fulfilled their duties competently, all have been free from scandal, and all deserve a second term.
If we have any reservations, they concern only one of the seven: Lynn Fitch.
Fitch is completing her first term as state legal director after serving eight years as state treasurer.
This may be true of all attorneys general, but Fitch has been particularly selective about the areas of law his agency focuses on. She seems to mostly love what’s trendy when it comes to prosecutions – social media abuse and human trafficking, for example – while ignoring the parts of her job that are arguably much more important and require more of courage to be executed.
Under his leadership, the attorney general’s office has failed to prosecute those who steal or misspend government money, and has not even been involved in the prosecution of the massive welfare scandal. He has done little to enforce the state’s campaign finance laws. More recently, he has been criticized for turning a blind eye to illegal foreign ownership of agricultural land. Veiled criticism of his misplaced priorities came from none other than other Republican state officials, including Hosemann, White and Watson.
The main reason we’d give Fitch four more years to do better, however, is his successful attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand. It certainly took a conservative takeover of the highest court in the land to make this possible. Nonetheless, Fitch deserves credit for guiding Mississippi’s defense of a pro-life law, which became the genesis of returning abortion policy to the states to decide individually. The Dobbs case was a monumental step in protecting the unborn, if not everywhere, then at least in states where inconvenience is not considered a valid reason to end a human life.
Fitch’s Democratic opponent, Greta Kemp Martin, is on the wrong side of this issue. Her main motivation for entering the race was to defend abortion rights. Although some of her positions, such as the aggressive pursuit of public corruption and the creation of a civil rights division to evaluate cases of discrimination, have merit, we cannot ignore her belief that a woman’s right to ‘terminating her pregnancy – for whatever reason – trumps a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy – for whatever reason -. the right of the unborn child to live.
Therefore, we support Fitch while hoping, if she wins, that she will listen to those who are frustrated by her apparent indifference to carrying out some of her key duties.
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