This afternoon I will leave the office early, go to my precinct’s polling place, and cast my vote for (or against) an array of candidates and ballot measures. I will approach the table in the gymnasium of the park district building my precinct uses as a polling place, give my name to the election judge at the table, sign an application form, and the election judge will give me a ballot. I will take the ballot to a voting booth, mark it with my votes, and insert it into the tabulating machine where it will be scanned and held until the polls close. In participating in that ritual I will be joining myself not just with those in my precinct, my state, or my country but with Americans going back to the founding of the Republic.
Rituals are an important part of the human experience. They reinforce behaviors; they bring us together. That is why they are a part of every enduring system of belief. Not just church services on Sunday but Jewish High Holidays and Passover; Muslim wudhu, prayer, and Ramadan; and the many Hindu rituals and religious holidays. Participation in rituals is central to Confucianism—right up there with filial piety. Confucius said: “Men of high office who are narrow-minded; propriety without respect and funerals without grief: how can I bear to look at such things?!”
Every system has rituals of birth, marriage, and death. There is evidence of rituals going back not merely as long as we have been a species but possibly even longer. They join us to all of genus Homo.
Those who reject or even disdain rituals as relics of the Dark Ages are not making themselves more than human but less than human.
This year when I vote I will be wearing a mask and maintaining social distance as well as I am able but I will participate in the ritual. It’s important. It cannot be replaced by absentee or online voting. Tearing down our civic rituals is part of tearing us apart as a nation.
Sometime in the next couple of hours, I’ll be going with my eldest to vote; it will be her first election. I took her a few times to the polling place when she was young, and rumor has it that I may have allowed her to choose a few candidates I was indifferent to.
An odd coincidence is that the first Presidential election I was eligible to vote in was also the first election in which Biden ran, though he had withdrawn well before the Illinois primaries. He seemed pretty old back then.
The important thing is that you voted (and hopefully your vote is counted and not sent off to lala land). People who don’t vote because of pox on both houses or laziness or whatever deserve all the bad governing they get.
In SW Delaware County, PA (and I believe through much of PA) they have gotten rid of the wholly electronic machines (parts no longer available, software malware, etc.) to scanned paper ballots. I feel much more comfortable with them. As I may have mentioned in previous posts, all-electronic voting reminds me of the election held in the rebel lunar colony of Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where Mike the self-aware master computer ran the election and ensured that all the ‘right’ candidates got elected.
Fully electronic voting has been an option available to voters here since, I think, 2002 but I always use the scanned ballots. Given the way ballots are tabulated, the totals made, and the way they are reported it would be pretty darned hard for my vote not to be counted.
Fraud would, however, be painfully easy. All it would take would be an election judge sitting over to the side manufacturing ballots and reporting them on behalf of individuals who neither voted in person nor absentee. That’s easy to do, too, by marking the precinct registration list (as well as the pre-printed journal as we were required to do) as people vote. When I was an election judge we always did that.
The deed was done, but there were no “I Voted” stickers. Its like going to an Ash Wednesday observance with nothing to show for it. My daughter was disappointed because all of her friends are taking selfies with their stickers. If anybody wants to suppress the vote of post-millennials, removing opportunities to document their lifestyle would be a good start.