The town also has a garbage dumpster provided by Aberdeen, its neighbor. People have to see that the reason they don't have dumpsters or running water is because the resources are going somewhere else. The tangible link between daily needs and the ballot box may be more obvious in rural areas, resulting in the generally higher voter turnouts in rural states, said Cory Fong, election administrator for North Dakota. North Dakota's 463,000 registered voters statewide are fewer than in many American cities. But an average of 71 percent of those eligible show up at the polls because they feel directly involved in their government's decisions, Fong said.
Government is a part of our everyday life.
We can walk down the street and talk to elected officials. In 10 years, the project has registered 15,000 people and delivered around 40,000 voters to the polls, said Wimberley. But he views this mainly as a coincidence, said Sandra Latta, a Hefner aide in Washington. The Piedmont people, meanwhile, see no coincidence in either the burst of voter participation or in what they reckon as a shift in Hefner's own voting patterns in Congress. For Brown, Wimberley and hundreds of others newly engaged in their communities, solving one problem simply paves the way to tackling another.