Letter: Jackson Outvoted Us With 24,000 Fewer Voters. That Should Worry Lakewood
Dear Scoop,
According to the county’s unofficial returns that TLS reported, Lakewood counted 22,556 ballots out of 66,776 registered voters. That is about 34 percent. Jackson counted 23,413 out of 42,533, which is 55 percent. Jackson cast 857 more ballots than we did, even though it has about 24,000 fewer registered voters.
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I spent Election Day knocking on doors in my neighborhood. When I read TLS’s “By The Numbers” breakdown the next morning, I had to read one line twice.
Some of the gap is easy to explain. Jackson cast nearly twice as many early votes as Lakewood did, 7,656 to 3,945. TLS also reported that one Lakewood district came in at under 8 percent. Our families are large, our days are long, and a Tuesday in November is a hard day to find an hour.
But elected officials and state agencies don’t count families or yeshivos. They count votes. When our numbers are low, it tells Trenton and Toms River that our concerns can wait: busing, school funding, roads, the shuttle, our share of county money. Every request our askanim make from now on starts with that number on the table.
This doesn’t take a big campaign. It takes a few habits:
Use early voting. It runs for days, including Sunday.
Make voting part of the family schedule, the same way we plan for a simcha.
And bring one neighbor. If every voter who went this year brought one more person, our turnout would double.
Next year there will be another election. Let’s make sure the numbers tell the right story about us. Votes are counted. Let’s make sure ours are.
A Neighbor Who Brought Three Neighbors To The Polls
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