Editor's note: This story was originally published Nov. 1, 2018, just prior to the midterm elections. On Nov. 5, Kentucky voters will go to the polls to decide who serves as governor for the next four years. If history is instructive, fewer than 1 out of 3 registered voters will make the effort to vote. It's shameful.

The firefighters arrived at the home at 10017 Silverwood Lane on Nov. 5, 1968.

They rolled the man out of the Valley Station house, into the street and up the ramp into the back of a moving van. It took nine men to do it.

They plugged into one portable generator on the back of the van. A second one was nearby in case the first went on the fritz.

And then, lying in the iron lung that kept him alive while amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, wasted his muscles, Billy Dare Ashley went to vote.

Once a common device in American hospitals, especially as polio ravaged the nation’s children, iron lungs were heavy metal tubes that used negative pressure to force their inhabitants to breathe.

Those who needed them to live were encapsulated in the iron lungs, their head the only part of their bodies sticking out. A collar would tighten around their necks to ensure a proper seal.

The election that November pitted Republican Richard Nixon against Vice President Hubert Humphrey and then-former and future Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

It would be the last presidential election that Ashley, a World War II veteran, government biochemist and Boy Scout leader, would live to see. But it showed an amazing dedication to an act that too many people so cavalierly dismiss these days.

In 2014, the last midterm election, just 37% of eligible voters cast ballots nationwide. It was the lowest voter turnout since World War II. In recent midterm elections, Kentucky voter turnout has hovered between 46 percent and 49 percent.

In this year's primary election, only 19.4% of Kentucky voters showed up at the polls. When Matt Bevin was first elected in 2015, only 30.6% of voters showed up for the general election.

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Michael McDonald, a professor who studies voter turnout at the University of Florida, recently told NPR that voter turnout nationwide may rise to between 45 percent and 50 percent this year. Kentucky Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes has predicted that 46 percent of Kentucky voters will show up at the polls on Tuesday.

For Ashley, it was an act of patriotism and one that he cherished, said his granddaughter, Ashley Hostetter, who was born a decade after Billy Ashley died.

"He felt a very strong pull to have a voice," said Hostetter, 36, a nurse who lives in Louisville.

Josh Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky and a voting rights expert, said that voter participation in the United States is low for a number of reasons, ranging from impediments like voter ID laws that make it more difficult to register, to simple voter apathy.

There has never been a "good old days" for voting in this country, he said.

"We have always placed barriers to voting for some people and there has always been apathy," Douglas said.

While some people have made extraordinary efforts to vote — like people going to the department of motor vehicles five or six times to get registered or one of Douglas' students, who is blind, who waited 45 minutes for poll workers to figure out how to use a handicapped-accessible voting machine — he said he had never heard of anyone like Ashley.

Most iron lungs went out of use as technology improved. Some, like Ashley, had to be in them permanently. Others required them only when they slept.

Brian Tiburzi, executive director of Post-Polio Health International, in St. Louis, said the iron lung waned as more portable breathing devices became available.

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At first there were smaller units that used negative pressure like the iron lung, and then more recently devices were developed that used positive pressure, similar to CPAP machines. Today, Tiburzi said, the number of iron lungs in use in the United States is in the single digits.

"I only know of three," he said.

Outside Ashley’s family, the day that Billy Ashley went to vote would likely be forgotten, if not for a single picture that appeared on page A7 of the Courier Journal on the day after the election that saw Nixon win his first term in a tight race.

In the photo, the tube that Ashley lived in until his death in 1972 could be seen, head-end stuck behind the voting booth's dark curtain. An unidentified man stood, one hand on the horrible, life-saving machine.

There was no story. Just the picture, with a caption below it.

"FROM AN IRON LUNG, Bill D. Ashley votes at Stonestreet Elementary School in Valley Station. Two Jefferson County election judges entered the booth with Ashley to pull levers at his direction," the newspaper said.

"I'm almost certain that B.D. Ashley voted for Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election," Hostetter said.

He was of an age that many in Kentucky were staunch Democrats — as he was — and supported the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who just a few decades earlier led the effort to defeat the Nazis.

Ashley served in the Army during World War II. He was a corporal in a medical training battalion in Texas before he was sent to Italy where, among other things, he helped evacuate people affected by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1944, Hostetter said.

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After he returned to the states, Ashley taught biochemistry at the University of Louisville for a while, and he went to work as a civilian biochemist studying toxins and anti-venoms at the Army Medical Research Laboratories at Fort Knox, according to his obituary and his granddaughter.

There were always exotic animals, the poisonous kind, around the house, Hostetter said.

"There are pictures of my grandmother, in a beehive hairdo, holding a cobra," she said.

Billy Ashley became ill in his late 40s and had to quit work, ultimately becoming tied to the iron tube where his weakened body lay. He was able to remain at home thanks to the U.S. Veterans Administration, which loaned him the iron lung, Hostetter said.

When he wanted to vote in 1968, it was again the VA that came to his aid. The agency arranged for a moving van and made sure he was moved safely without endangering his life, she said.

"They let him vote and do what he thought was his most God-given right," Hostetter said.

At the time, Kentucky law allowed only those who would be absent from their home precincts on Election Day to vote by absentee ballots. People who were old and very sick were required to vote in person.

Photo negatives of his trip to the polls still exist in Courier Journal archives, many of them better than the one that ran in the newspaper on Nov. 6, 1968.

One shows Dorothea Ashley standing next to her husband in the iron lung at the couple's home. Another shows her signing him in at the polls.

There's a photo of the iron lung being loaded onto the moving van, another of him in the truck, an earnest young firefighter looking at the power generator while Ashley's iron lung sat among stacks of pads that were intended to prevent furniture from banging together.

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Hostetter didn't recognize anyone in the photos other than her grandparents. Joe Bowman, who has been with the Pleasure Ridge Park Fire Department since 1977, said that it was definitely PRP that helped move Ashley, but he didn't know the names of any of the firefighters in the photos.

They took him two-tenths of a mile to the school to vote. Then they took him home.

And Billy Ashley would never vote again.

On March 17, 1972, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a law that allowed the elderly and people who were infirm to vote by absentee ballot.

Two weeks later, Ashley died. It was six months and seven days before Nixon would face re-election against Democrat George McGovern.

Hostetter said Billy and Dorothea Ashley passed onto their two children and ultimately their grandchildren the belief that voting is important. According to voter registration information, she's voted in every election since at least 2011.

"I frequently tell people, 'You have no excuse not to vote,'" she said.

The granddaughter of Billy Dare Ashley should know.

Joseph Gerth's opinion column runs on most Sundays and at various times throughout the week. He can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/josephg.