‘The vote’ most central, singular element of our republic
If any of us, as Americans, were asked to identify the most central and singular element of our republic, our response, universally, would be “the vote.” The vote is the essential root of our society’s grass-rooted self-determination, and though our past carries the taint of vote-exclusion based on gender and race, the American vote remains the envy of history and much of living humanity.
Typically, and willingly, we have exercised “the vote” in appropriate local settings-schools, municipal buildings, and community centers, where we expected to stand in line and even welcomed the reconnection with acquaintances that happens naturally in such crowded settings. Reaching the end of that line, we have cast our vote in various ways that evolved over time-from marks on paper to mechanical levers and, most recently, to screens we touch while hoping in the device’s electronic integrity.
Throughout that evolution the option to mail our vote, entrusted to the care of the United States Postal Service, has been a constant, originally to avail the vote as “absentees” to those shut-in at home or away on military service, or pursuing education, who could not gather in person in their community, but increasingly prevalent nationwide as simply another valid way to cast “the vote.”
Now, as every one of us knows too well, a phenomenon of contagious disease casts a disruptive pall over our familiar practice of casting “the vote” among gathered community. Given that contagion, it is glaringly inconsistent to force citizens who, in the interest of self-health and the public good, have quarantined for months, sacrificing work, education, and contact with extended family to assemble in crowded queues for one day to cast “the vote” when other means of exercising that right, most applicably voting by mail, are available (or potentially available).
Despite this excruciating dilemma American citizens now face, President Trump remains obstinate in his refusal to allow support for the United States Postal Service that would ensure its ability to deliver a contagion-free vote efficiently and uniformly from across the country. And disturbingly, the President’s appointed USPS leadership has recently imposed operational changes that could curb an apolitical and long-respected agency’s capacity to collect and deliver “the vote” within the tight time-frame needed.
It is notable that several recent elections, tallied mostly by electronic devices, prompted calls from all political perspectives for a documentable “paper-trail.” Mailed ballots would meet that call by establishing an irrefutable paper-trail that could be checked and accepted.
This situation gives rise to sobering questions: Under our current national trial by disease, shouldn’t true public consensus by “the vote” be not only encouraged but facilitated through every technological and practical means? Would not every elected leader, at all levels of government from township, borough, county, and state to loftiest federal office wish to know that his or her status and recognized authority rose out of that true consensus? Or, has victory itself become more important than “the vote?”
Ben Moyer
Farmington