The Vote Needs Rocking

I remember one Election Day many years ago, when I was a working journalist, It was near the end of my workday, and I was about to leave the office and go to the polls, when a major story broke. Naturally, circumstances required me to cover it, and when it was wrapped up, I discovered that I had missed the closing of the polls.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a big election, but I didn’t want that to happen again, so I became an absentee voter, and have cheerfully mailed my votes in ever since. Still, I had relatives who enjoyed the tome-honored personal tradition of going to the polls on Election Day to exercise their constitutional right.

I appreciate tradition, but that word is often defined as doing something a certain way because it has always been done that way. As I have said, this will be an unconventional year, literally and figuratively, thanks to COVID. The once-crucial gatherings at which the parties picked their Presidential candidates may just be a contest to see who puts on the bigger Zoom meeting.

Even Election Day itself has lost much of its traditional meaning. It once was the day on which almost everyone voted; now it’s just a point on the calendar at the end of a long process that will start weeks earlier, as early-voting periods begin. And it may not end on Election Night either, as all those new mail-in votes come in and will require counting.

I have a long election wish list. First, I would like to see the process of qualifying to vote and voting as nationalized as we can make it. The laws from state to state should be as similar as the rules of the road are for drivers. I’d like to see primaries held regionally in quick succession - I think Gerald Ford came up with that idea. And finally, the Electoral College should go away, the popular vote should decide the Presidential race, with the proviso that the finish be sort of like tennis: the winner must beat the closest opponent by at least 3 percentage points, and if not, a runoff between the top two.

But back to Earth, and the real election facing us. Debates continue over who gets to vote, when, and by what means, none of which we may resolve right now. But my hope is that the victor in the Presidential race gets there by so crushing a landslide that all complaints about process, disenfranchisement, or rigging are overwhelmed by sheer numbers. This is one year where what we need is an open-and-shut case, a slam-dunk, an end-of-story. It is then that we will know what kind of a country we’re living in.