Every election is decided by the people who vote. That is not a slogan. It is arithmetic.
On Tuesday, Alabama will choose a new governor. Tommy Tuberville and Doug Jones have done what candidates do. They have made their case, raised their money, run their ads and asked for our trust. Some questions they answered. Some they did not. For months, Alabama has had the opportunity to judge who they are and how they would govern.
Now the matter passes from them to us. That is as it should be.
The candidates have asked for the job. We owe ourselves more than leaving the hiring to someone else.
A year ago, the race looked settled before it had begun. A November 2025 Cygnal poll had Tuberville leading Jones 53 percent to 34 percent, and the firm's own memo predicted a blowout. Some recent polling has shown the race within the margin of error.
Read the polls. Just don't mistake them for the verdict.
A poll is a photograph of a moving thing. It can show where a race stood when the survey was taken. It cannot settle where the race will finish. The people who cast ballots will do that.
Here is what Alabama does not like to say out loud: in elections like this one, most registered voters stay home.
Presidential elections draw more of us to the polls. Without a president on the ballot, participation falls sharply. In 2022, only 38.6 percent of registered Alabamians cast ballots.
Do the math. Alabama had about 3.8 million registered voters this spring. If Tuesday looks like 2022, roughly 1.47 million will vote. In a close race, a candidate could win the most powerful office in state government with about 735,000 votes.
Fewer than one in five registered voters could choose the governor. Everyone lives with the result.
Sometimes the margin is thinner than anyone imagines. In the 2017 Senate special election, Jones won by fewer than 22,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. A different decision by a small share of the people who stayed home could have changed the result.
We call voting a right, and it is. But possessing that right does not relieve us of the responsibility to use it. We owe that much to ourselves, to our neighbors and to those who risked their lives to secure that right.
Alabama, of all places, knows that price. There are people still living who marched, were beaten and were jailed so that every Alabamian could cast a ballot. They were demanding a voice in the government that exercised power over their lives.
Leaving that ballot unused is not neutrality. It is a decision to let someone else decide.
Some will say their vote doesn't count. The outcome is settled, the system doesn't listen, the politicians are all the same. That frustration is real, and too often those in power have earned it. People have watched promises disappear after Election Day. They have watched public officials answer to donors while treating the people who elected them as an inconvenience.
But those with money and access are not discouraged. They will make the calls, attend the meetings and press their interests. Our absence leaves them with less opposition.
Staying home exempts no one from government. The next governor will help decide how our schools are funded and what our teachers earn, whether rural hospitals keep their doors open, how prisons are run in our name, and what taxes families pay on groceries and gasoline. That power reaches the voter and the nonvoter alike.
Government does not require our participation to exercise power over our lives. Holding it accountable does.
Alabama has lived with the consequences of too little accountability for too long. A neglected school, a shuttered hospital, a prison system that disgraces the state—these are not problems that arrived without decisions behind them. Someone set the priorities. Someone approved the spending. Someone decided another year could pass. Elections are when those people must answer for it.
The governor is not the only power on Tuesday's ballot. Every seat in the Legislature is up. So are Alabama's seats in the U.S. House, an open U.S. Senate seat, the lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and other constitutional offices, and two seats on the Alabama Supreme Court.
The people elected to those offices will write our laws, spend our money, and interpret and enforce our rights. None of that power belongs to the people who hold it. We lend it to them.
Before we lend it, we ought to ask what we expect in return. What experience does this person bring? Do they understand the government they want to lead? Will they answer to the public when the campaign is over?
And above all, what character will they carry into office when no one is watching and the easy thing and the right thing part ways?
Experience can be gained in office. Character has to be brought to it.
Competence, honesty and a sense of duty should be the least Alabama expects from anyone seeking public office. We have accepted less too often and paid for it long after the campaign signs came down. Before we give anyone the authority to govern, we ought to be satisfied that they understand whom they serve.
Polls open at 7 a.m. Tuesday and close at 7 p.m. If you aren't sure where to vote, AlabamaVotes.gov will tell you.
Elections are arithmetic. Citizenship is not. It is the decision to be counted.
