This year’s round of primary elections is swiftly drawing closer, and while this year’s ballot will not feature a presidential candidate, there are still plenty of reasons to get out and vote.

On May 22, the residents of Troup County will have the opportunity to vote on who will represent us in Congress, on the Troup County Board of Commissioners, on the school board and at the state level.

Historically, primaries tend to see a low turnout in Troup County. In the 2016 primary, only 7,972 people voted. That is a little more than 10 percent of the county’s population. The election in November 2016, also saw a decidedly depressing turnout with only 11,855 votes. We won’t even start on the November 2017 election where only 6,669 people went to the polls to decide whether to renew a county-wide Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.

We like to think that most citizens do care, and based on the energetic discussions that occur daily on our online articles, there are some passionate citizens who live and work in Troup County. We’d like to encourage these people to bring their concerns to the candidates and to the polls.

In many of these recent elections a couple hundred votes — or in a rare few cases a couple dozen — decided who would represent the people of Troup County. It is up to us as citizens of Troup County to evaluate the candidates and vote.

We plan to start publishing candidate announcements next month to assist in that evaluation, and candidates still have until Friday to submit their information for publication.