ABSTRACT
How one’s sense of civic duty can influence the decision whether to vote or not was driven home to me in a very personal
way in November 1998. I must confess that I did not vote in that election. Like many fellow baby boomers, I was relatively nonchalant about failing to participate. In my own mind, I felt that I had a pretty good excuse: About a week before the election, my father had undergone heart bypass surgery. I had flown across the country on short notice to be there, and the thought of getting an absentee ballot before I left California was not something that crossed my mind. (By the time I arrived on the East Coast, it was too late to request an absentee ballot by mail, but I later realized that I could have requested one in person just before I had left.) Ironically, I was able to keep a few commitments on election day to do radio interviews on the topic of nonvoting by simply e-mailing the producers that I would be at a different phone number. The fact that I wasn’t voting that day came up a couple times on the air and led to some interesting discussions, but no real embarrassment on my part.
