EDITORIAL: Take your pick, Aurora, or let 1 voter out of 4 do it for you

Already unhappy about the fact that your Colorado pot tax refund will be going right back into state government coffers? Guess you should have voted.

As is often the case, only about 30 percent of registered voters in Aurora turned in ballots that decided a host of issues we must all now live with, probably for years to come. What makes that statistic even more alarming is that only about 60 percent of the eligible population in Aurora even bothers to register to vote. It means that even though almost all of us have opinions about how schools should improve, whether we should be able to openly carry guns and rifles walking down the street, whether we should spend more or less money on cops, or whether we should some day entertain the idea of building a NASCAR racetrack in Aurora, a very few of us are making all those decisions.

It’s not as if voting is difficult in Aurora and all of Colorado. State officials have gone to great lengths to make it easy to register to vote, and even to vote. Now, all elections allow voters to have a ballot mailed to their homes weeks before the election, fill it out at home and mail it in or just drop it off.

Despite that, out of almost 200,000 Aurora residents who are eligible to vote each year, fewer than 50,000 people actually did vote this year, about 1 out of every 4.

If you don’t vote, you may think that one voter who spoke for three non-voters is probably pretty representative of his or her non-voting peers. You’d be wrong. Those who vote during so-called “off-year” elections are generally substantially older and more conservative than those who vote in general elections, and much more so than the population at large.

Aurora narrowly voted down proposition 2J this week, which would have removed language from the city charter preventing it from negotiating any kind of incentive deals with potential raceway owners. The language was surreptitiously imposed on Aurora by out-of-town interests who only wanted to protect their own interests south of Colorado Springs. They essentially duped Aurora voters years ago, and it’s been irrelevant ever since. While nobody is actually looking right now to build a raceway in the city, voters this week narrowly defeated the idea, for no good reason. Conservatives looked at the question not as one of local control, but as a referendum on whether they though allowing the city to makes deals for NASCAR tracks is something they’d like.

It was a last-minute question with virtually no campaign to explain it, but it’s easy to make an argument that the 2015 electorate was much older and much more conservative than all of Aurora, and now we’re all going to live with that electorate’s decisions.

And even though the final ballots have yet to be tabulated from this election, next year’s presidential ballot for 2016 is already fully in play. Much is at state and much will be decided by those who take the time to cast their ballots.

Health care, war, taxes, gun control, abortion rights, immigration, the economy and so much more will be at stake next year. If you agree with all the decisions made during this election, then go about your business. But if some or much of what voters did this week doesn’t make sense to you, get ready to vote your own ballot instead of voter 1-in-4 making the decisions for you.