Finally, it is actually 2016.
Maybe now, voters will get serious about the choices to be made in this election year.
With this being a presidential election year and a most extraordinary one at that, it may seem that the election season has already gone on too long. But it is really just beginning.
Not a single vote has been cast anywhere. Nor will one be taken until Iowa voters gather for their caucuses in February.
Conventional thinking is that many voters don’t engage until an election is near and decisions are unavoidable.
The truth is many people never engage at all, leaving it to others to make the choices. That’s the only explanation for chronically low numbers of eligible voters who actually participate in the process.
Take Arkansas, for example. In 2008, the last presidential primary vote that involved no incumbent for president, statewide turnout was 34.64 percent for the combined Democratic and Republican primaries.
That’s the turnout among registered voters, which excludes the many eligible voters who don’t even bother to get registered. Barely more than one in three of the 1,570,081 registered voters showed up to vote in 2008.
Four years later, the turnout was even worse for the primaries. Statewide, 21.87 percent of voters participated in the primaries and the number of registered voters itself slipped to 1,538,619 statewide.
Now, we’re coming up on an early primary election on March 1, when Arkansas will join other states in the South in what is being called the SEC primary, named for the football conference in which many Southern state teams play.
That SEC primary is just a couple of months away.
And the date for Arkansas voters to register to vote in it comes even sooner. The deadline to register is less than a month away on Feb. 1.
So get registered if you aren’t already and get ready not just to vote in the presidential primaries but also in the state’s primaries to choose nominees for everything from state legislators to county judge and other local and regional officials.
When state lawmakers moved the presidential primaries, they also set the state-level primaries for the same March 1 date, well in advance of the usual May votes in Arkansas.
Candidates for those offices have been out there, even during the holidays, trying to get noticed by voters. Their efforts will increase dramatically with the dawn of the New Year; but they’ll still be challenged to get anyone’s ear with so much attention focused on the national election.
Give them a break. Pay them some attention. And remember your own stake in these local and state elections. Someone will be your legislator or your county judge or fill any of the other offices that are being decided in this year’s election, whether you vote or not.
The process starts with the preferential primaries for the partisan elections from president on down. The eventual nominees of the respective parties will face off in that all-important November vote.
March 1 isn’t just the date for choosing party nominees to do battle in the general election. The election process will actually end on March 1 for some candidates.
Take particular note of the nonpartisan judicial elections. Unless there are more than three candidates, potentially forcing a runoff, judicial races will definitely be decided on March 1.
The most significant of them are for statewide election to the Arkansas Supreme Court.
There are two contests, one for an associate justice position and the other for chief justice.
Whoever wins on March 1 will eventually be among just seven justices on the state’s high court and each will serve eight-year terms, although many voters will give these choices far less attention than they deserve.
The chief justice race this year might be an exception, since it involves a sitting associate justice, Courtney Goodson, who has been the subject of considerable controversy. Dan Kemp, a circuit judge from Mountain View, is challenging her.
The other race is between Clark Mason of Little Rock and Shawn Womack of Mountain Home.
Both of these races matter, as do all the others on the Arkansas ballots.
So get engaged. Register to vote. Figure out who will be on your ballot for all offices. And vote.
In the meantime, use the Internet and other resources to learn who they are and what they want to do.
The Secretary of State’s web site is as good a place to start as any. It provides candidate information for all who have filed as well as a list that can be searched by name, position or party.
Go to www.sos.arkansas.gov/electionresults and pull down on “candidate information” to get the searchable list, then click on individual names to find out more.
That’s only a start, but it might awaken some voters to the work they need to do before election day.