Let's keep more of us engaged

No, the campaign that ended with voting Tuesday did not bring the Democrats their presidential nominee.

Still, there were astonishing developments that deserve more attention and thought from party activists and all the rest of us.

Participation in this primary soared in Northern Illinois. It jumped despite the pretty awful weather that came with moving the primary date up several weeks. Some, but not all, of the increase can be attributed to the hot Democratic race featuring two people with Illinois roots: Sen. Hillary Clinton of Park Ridge and Sen. Barack Obama of Chicago.

The statistics are fairly staggering: A 10-percentage-point jump in voters participating in suburban Cook County, an 18-percentage-point jump in DuPage, a nearly 11-percentage-point jump in Lake, 13-percentage-points in Kane and a 4-point tick in McHenry.

For the first time ever in what was the state's Republican stronghold, DuPage County election officials report more people took Democratic ballots than Republican. More than 23,000 more Democratic ballots were cast than GOP ballots. Also a first, more Democratic ballots were cast than Republican in McHenry County. That DuPage and McHenry news ought to cause GOP activists statewide to speed their efforts to boost their relevance.

But the heightened participation in democracy cannot be solely attributed to Democratic excitement. There also were significant increases in GOP votes cast in suburban Cook and most collar counties. Those GOP increases range from an 11-percentage-point jump in suburban Cook in participation from the 2004 primary to a 25-percentage-point increase in GOP ballots in DuPage from 2004.

Clearly, this isn't just a Democratic surge. The economic uncertainty, the Iraq war, the struggle to afford health care, the current president's low popularity, the fact that this is the first election since 1952 without an incumbent president or a vice president running all may have played a big part in driving up turnout.

It has been refreshing to hear in recent weeks that more and more younger voters are educating themselves, interested and active.

What is left for us now is to see if there might be some ways in which we can work to keep participation near these levels or even higher.

Certainly we cannot control whether the top of the tickets feature wide-open competitive races, but we can look at other options.

Several of the state primaries before and after Super Tuesday feature weekend voting. Democratic voters set a participation record with their Saturday voting in South Carolina a few weeks back, but, a week earlier, the same did not happen on a rainy Saturday in South Carolina for Republicans. Nevada's Saturday caucuses Jan. 19 did set records for both major political parties. Other ideas to drive up turnout debated over the years include making Election Days holidays or allowing voting via the Internet -- with necessary safeguards against voter fraud.

It might well be time to study these and other options more carefully because the debate and participation this campaign season has been a beautiful thing to behold.