Voting apathy can have dire effects

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the 20% voter turnout for

Tuesday’s congressional election was not too bad, even if they cite

that it was a special election in a race that almost inevitably will

be won by the early Republican front-runner.

Instead, believe this: Just one out of five voters in the 48th

Congressional District, which includes Newport Beach as well as

Irvine and other parts of south Orange County, cared enough to vote

in a race that will decide who will represent them in the U.S. House

of Representatives for years and years to come. Most likely, the next

representative -- and we all can safely assume that person will be

Republican state Sen. John Campbell -- will stay in office as long as

he wants. And 80% of voters don’t much care about that.

We are not at this point going to lament the damage done to

democracy when voters don’t exercise their right to vote. We are not

going to lash out about voter apathy. We are not even going to beg

the five remaining candidates to address issues, attend forums and

campaign door-to-door in order to get voters interested and engaged.

In another election, any and all of those things would be good

cause to drive voters to the polls. This time, though, we simply will

point out that in the past few months there has been ample, awful

evidence of how important a representative from the federal

government can be in our daily lives.

Hurricane Katrina is the most obvious, and most awful, evidence.

The miscommunication and disorder that reigned between the federal

and local governments has been well documented and well debated

already. If ever there is a time when a strong voice and commanding

leadership was needed, it is in such moments of terror and in the

difficult aftermath we still are watching unfold in the Gulf Coast.

If the hurricane seems a far-off rationale, we instead can look

just a few miles south of Newport’s city limits to Laguna Beach,

where a landslide in June damaged 22 homes. City leaders still are

battling to get money for repair, and complaints about the response

by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were legion in Laguna long

before FEMA’s even more horrific missteps following Hurricane

Katrina.

The landslide happened right here in the 48th Congressional

District. If anything like it happens again, you can be sure that

100% of voters will be clamoring for strong, decisive leadership from

Washington -- even those who did not care enough to vote this fall.