Kim Wehle > Quotes

“…voting is important not because the right to vote appears in the Constitution (it doesn’t), but because voting preserves all other constitutional rights. It’s the linchpin for everything else. … One important check on government abuses of power, in addition to lawsuits, is through voting. Otherwise, government officials become above the law and their bad behavior won’t stop.”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why

“Voting is vitally important, even if an individual vote doesn’t sway a particular election one way or another. It is the only way that “We the People” self-govern. The ability to self-govern is a privilege and a gift – one that we honor by showing up at the ballot booth, even if your vote doesn’t “matter” in altering a particular race. It’s sometimes hard for Americans to fathom that not everyone on the planet enjoys the privilege of self-government. If we want to keep that privilege, we need to exercise it.”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why

“Voting is vitally important, even if an individual vote doesn’t sway a particular election one way or another. It is the only way that “We the People” self-govern. The ability to self-govern is a privilege and a gift--one that we honor by showing up at the ballot booth, even if your vote doesn’t “matter” in altering a particular race. It’s sometimes hard for Americans to fathom that not everyone on the planet enjoys the privilege of self-government. If we want to keep that privilege, we need to exercise it.”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why

“If voting didn’t matter much, foreign governments wouldn’t try to influence it. And if voting didn’t matter much, we wouldn’t see efforts in America to make it harder for certain people to vote. Your vote does matter.”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why

“I tell my first-year law students that they will be learning how to read. "Huh? We've known how to read since we were six!" Sure, that's true, in the sense that students come to law school knowing cognitively how to translate black-and-white marks on a page into words. But what I mean by read is different. It requires you to isolate phrases, then individual words, and then figure out as many interpretations of those words as possible. Once you have the various options on the table, you can start to prioritize the options and choose which is best---or at least how to argue for one over the other on behalf of a client. This is a skill, and one that is becoming increasingly rare in a world of information overload, texts, tweets, and sound bites.”
― Kim Wehle, How to Read the Constitution--and Why

“November 2016, nearly half of eligible American voters failed to participate in choosing their next president.3 Why?”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why

“When it comes to voter fraud, here are the facts: It’s exceedingly rare. It happens between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent of the time. Out of one billion votes cast from 2000 to 2014, research revealed a paltry thirty-one instances of voters casting fraudulent votes in person. It almost never happens. Most problems with improper voting stem from clerical and computer errors. According to scholars affiliated with Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Yale University, during the 2012 election cycle, the possibility that a registered voter would commit fraud by voting twice was under 0.02 percent.12 Fraud is more likely to be committed by campaigns engaging in fraudulent voter registrations or fraudulent absentee ballot applications or submissions.13”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why

“The safest way to stay registered is to vote in every election you can.”
― Kim Wehle, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why