On June 23rd, the citizens of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The long-term impact of this vote – how it will affect the U.K., the E.U., and the world as a whole – won’t be clear for some time. But that it happened at all is something that Americans, right now, can and should take note of and learn from for our own upcoming vital elections.
1. Our votes actually matter.
“I didn’t think my vote was going to matter too much,” a Leave-voter told BBC news the morning after the vote. He is one of many who have come forward, to the news and to Twitter, and admitted that they’d only voted Leave as a symbolic protest, not thinking that their vote would actually contribute to their country leaving the E.U. But contribute it did.
Americans have similar ideas about how much our votes count in an election. We think that our individual vote is meaningless, because there are so many people in the United States, or because the delegate system is rigged against us, or because the votes of people from one state are more heavily weighted than the votes of people from another state. Before the primary season began, when I told a friend I was going to vote in my home state of Illinois instead of my school state of Iowa, she said, “But your vote would have more power in Iowa!”
That isn’t how it works. In a democracy, one person gets one vote. It doesn’t matter what state you live in, if that state has primaries or caucuses, or how many delegates the state has. One person gets one vote, and all the individual votes add up fast. The Leave campaign won by four percentage points, and while that margin looks tiny, it’s significant enough to change the future of a nation. And when that small of a margin is significant, every vote counts. We need to spend our votes wisely.
How do we do that?
2. Do research before voting.
After the polls closed the night of the vote, one question spiked in U.K. Google searches: “What is the E.U.?” This implies that a lot of people in the U.K. waited until after they’d cast their vote on whether to leave the E.U. to do the most cursory research on the topic.
Listen up, Americans: if you don’t know what you’re voting for, and you vote anyway, then it’s completely up to chance whether your vote will support the side that will help you and the world, or the side that will hurt you and the world. In order to make good decisions, we need to be informed voters, and that means taking the time to research the topic on the table. These days, it’s easy to get our hands on a lot of information very quickly, thanks to the internet. That information does us no good if we don’t seek it out, so seek it out we must, because the consequences of a poorly-informed decision can be huge.
But while we do our research, there’s one more Brexit lesson we need to keep in mind.
3. Politicians lie.
I know how ridiculous this “lesson” sounds. We all know that politicians lie. It’s even a part of what we teach children about politics – I remember a Berenstain Bears book in which Papa Bear got elected mayor by promising more worms for the birds and fewer birds for the worms, and was promptly confronted by an angry mob demanding that he keep his impossible promises.
While this children’s book scenario is humorous, political lies are real, and a really big deal. Before the vote, the Brexit campaign claimed that if they left the E.U., the £350 million per week that the U.K. sends to the E.U. would instead go to the National Health Service (NHS). But it was all a lie. After the vote, Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party and a strong campaigner for Brexit said that there was no guarantee that any of that money would go to the NHS, distancing himself from the claim and calling it a “mistake”.
That is a lot of money to lie about, and a lot of people were swayed by that lie. So, Americans, while we all “know” that politicians lie, we have to act on that knowledge. Not only do we need to seek out information, but we also need to think critically about the information we find. We cannot simply trust the loudest voice with the biggest bus-side ad. We need to behave wisely and responsibly. That’s the real way to take charge of our nation’s future.
