Joco Today

An Overland Park man cast his vote early for Tuesday's General Election and encouraged people to be “self-governing patriots” by voting.

David Copeland, who according to his LinkedIn profile, is a retired professional engineer and Kansas Director for Convention of States Action, told Sarah Downey of Metric Media News in a Zoom interview that people who chose not to vote in the election may have squandered a real privilege.

“If you abdicate your role as a self-governor of this country, then you may not have another chance to vote,” Copeland said. “I have a friend who was in Iraq when they voted, and they dabbed their thumb in the ink, indelible ink. They’re willing to risk their life to do something they’ve never been able to do before.

Copeland | Facebook

“Then I would say, ‘Look at that and decide whether voting is important or not,’ and someday when you can’t vote, you’ll rue the day that you decided that you weren’t going to vote."

As of last Saturday, 711,664 total early votes were cast in Kansas for the 2020 General Election, according to the U.S. Elections Project. Kansas’ in-person votes were 318,178, and mail ballots returned were 393,486.

“If we don’t vote, we’re not governing, and if we don’t govern, then we’re back to 1776 where we had no say in how we were governed, and we fought a revolution to change that,” Copeland said. “Today, we are still fighting that revolution over forces that would like to see us not be self-governing, and citizens who would accept their role in the Constitution and step up and govern, and that’s how I see myself, as a governing body.”

Copeland told Downey that state legislatures are important because they created the federal government.

“You can’t have a solid federal government without a solid state government," he said. "I would like to see more conservatives in our state legislature, both in Senate and House.”

Copeland has been a volunteer and the director of Convention of States Action since March 2018. The group is focused on calling for state legislatures to call a Convention of States to propose amendments to the Constitution to limit the federal government’s power, according to Copeland's LinkedIn profile.