Many in SC still fight for voting rights. So why have other people already surrendered?

Public shaming isn’t something I generally support, but in this case I am willing to make an exception.

It’s time for some vote shaming or, more accurately, some failing to vote shaming.

Some 40,096 Lexington County residents were registered to vote in Tuesday’s elections.

It might come as a disappointment, but sadly not as a surprise, then to learn that only 4,373 of them actually decided to cast a ballot.

That’s just 10.91%.

But low voter turnout isn’t just a Lexington County problem.

Richland County’s 91,536 registered voters also had a chance to make their opinions known at the polls

Just 20,352 of them actually did.

The outcomes were similar across South Carolina. In Myrtle Beach, just 21.7% of voters cast a ballot.

And, even in our capital city of Columbia, just 22.7% of registered voters bothered to vote for mayor.

That means not even a quarter of voters took the time to pick the person who will lead the city for the next four years.

We in the news media can share some of the blame for the low numbers.

Many of us called it an “off-election year,” that designation given when no presidential, midterm or even statewide races are on the ballot.

But the reality is there is no such thing as an off year when it comes to choosing our leaders, the people entrusted with operating our governments and making the laws that affect us each and every day.

Politicians often laud the men and women who serve in the military for protecting the American right to vote and people in the audience applaud and cheer.

But many of those same people, it appears, didn’t really mean it.

On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke about voting rights before a joint session of Congress.

His speech followed the events of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when more than 600 civil rights marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and faced brutal attacks by Alabama state troopers.

“There, long suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed,” Johnson said, referencing the death of Rev. James Reeb, who was killed after being attacked by a group of white supremacists.

The march came after another death, that of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was shot by an Alabama state trooper.

“It was the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson that provoked the march from Selma to Montgomery,” the late Congressman John Lewis said in 2007. “It was his death and his blood that gave us the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

In his speech, Johnson urged Congress to meet the moment in history and finally give all Americans access to the right to vote promised to them as citizens of this nation.

“To deny a man his hopes because of his color or race or his religion or the place of his birth is not only to do injustice. It is to deny America and dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom,” Johnson said.

He said each American was entitled to their Constitutional rights.

“The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders,” Johnson said. “Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right.”

On Nov. 2 thousands of South Carolinians chose to deny themselves that right and for that we should all be ashamed.

This story was originally published November 3, 2021 at 11:50 AM.