This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Those pesky protesters. Some didn't even vote. "If you didn't vote, you cannot complain," say "vote-shamers" in the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump peanut gallery.
Yeah. If every one of the 1,000 or so protesters who showed up at the Capitol last week had voted for Clinton, she would've lost Utah by only about 177,000 votes.
Fact is, except for a handful of races in Salt Lake County, judicial retentions and bond initiatives, casting a vote in Utah was mostly redundant; winners and losers were a safe bet. My votes for president, governor, state Legislature, U.S. House and U.S. Senate — the most prominent and possibly most important races — had symbolic meaning only.
Perhaps some of the protesters were angry in a generic sense, realizing that nothing they could've done — voting or any other level of participation this side of armed revolution — would've changed the outcome of the presidential election. Trump won despite a clear majority for Clinton thanks to an arcane 18th-century invention, the Electoral College, created for probably good reasons then but only stifling democracy now.
We can expect more vote-shaming and unfocused protests until major democratic reform efforts targeting gerrymandering, voter suppression, campaign financing, influence of narrow-interest lobbying, political party operations, the role of news media and more are taken seriously.
Six years ago, two Utah nonpartisan groups, Utahns for Ethical Government and Fair Boundaries, began conversations regarding several of these structural problems. It's time to start talking again.
Bill Keshlear
Salt Lake City