Voters: Do your homework!
Elections are exciting, and I am so grateful for them!
We’re lucky to live in a democratic republic that values the peaceful transfer of power, a nation that depends on a trustworthy election process already in place, one modeled by countries around the world.
Even so, as we get ready to vote, there continues to be a lot of discussion surrounding the effectiveness and the security of mail-in voting and whether or not it will be legitimate.
Many Americans are concerned that an unsolicited mail-in format will make cheating easier. Still, tossing voter registrations, stuffing the ballots and other kinds of sabotage have occurred in the past with traditional forms of voting as well.
But fraud is not the issue. The hypothetical narratives and even fringe conspiracy theories feeding the tug and pull over which party does or doesn’t benefit from certain forms of voting doesn’t matter as much as how long Americans can hold their breath while the votes are tallied. Some are even suggesting, as a mitigation tool, that cable and mainstream media refrain from the traditional coverage that has historically reported the popular and Electoral College vote state by state on Election Night.
That move seems fraught with its own set of problems. Freedom of the press comes to mind, as does access to information.
Sound bites are catchy, but they don’t tell the whole story. It’s up to us as citizens to do the homework and consider the facts beforehand. Otherwise, we can’t really get to the bottom of what is going on and why and how things happen the way they do.
A seemingly quaint idea, but it always translates to the reality on the ground, also known as the facts and the truth. Information and perspective are lost when we rule out a news source because it is said to be biased. All perspectives matter.
All information is useful, whether it aligns with a held point of view or not. Am I alone in this idea? Or perhaps the sight of a person’s name or the sound of a person’s voice creates a bias of its own?
A friend of mine says she can’t get past what she characterizes as the sound of President Donald Trump’s chauvinistic, racist voice. She says it makes her feel physically ill. When I ask her about
the current administration’s policies, she cannot consider those because she just can’t move past the persona. When I ask her about former Vice President Joe Biden, whom she tepidly supports, she cannot list any policy in his nearly half-century of public life that has furthered the livelihoods of all Americans.
She’s hoping Biden will use the right rhetoric to bridge the great divide we all feel in America right now. But is rhetoric enough? Is acting presidential enough to heal this ailing nation?
The idea that President Trump has been fighting delegitimization from the get-go makes me wonder how he faces half a country that cannot accept him as their president even after he was recently nominated (more than once!) for the Nobel Peace Prize for his foreign policy around Syria and the
UAE and Israel, and their historic signing of The Abraham Accord. What would our country look like today if the left could have accepted election results four years ago and behaved as the loyal opposition party in the name of working toward a common goal of making this country stronger, healthier and prouder, rather than focused continually on ousting Trump?
And so today, even as the U.S. Postal Service has been politicized and even as it readies to receive millions of ballots that have been delivered in the last few weeks, many voters continue to volley the validity of mail-in voting for fear of its fraudulence. Yes, there have been glitches — ballots found in ditches, for instance.
But it’s not so much the serious issue of fraud, it’s the fact that large numbers of
mail-in votes, each state with its own set of rules, have the potential to slow the whole election process, and in doing so, might sow doubt in the very fundamentals of our American election process, a process that has worked fairly well up until now, even with its occasional snafus. It stands to reason that it should work as it has in the past, yet a bottleneck of mailin ballots might create the chance for a very polarized media and viscerally opposing political parties to further cast doubt.
The danger of a system that can’t handle a potential glut of ballots might open the door on all sides for chaos and drawn-out litigation.
Remember when Hillary Clinton a couple weeks ago advised Biden not to concede no matter what? Try explaining to your seventh-grader
why his football team should not concede defeat when they’ve lost. This is what it has come to.
Whatever your view, this kind of confusion is problematic for obvious reasons. It’s why I am voting in person. I’ll wear a mask. I’ll sanitize my hands before and after. I’ll have my ID. I’ll see my vote as it enters the box securely. I’ll thank the volunteers. And who knows? Maybe the millions of votes via in-person ballots at real polling stations or through absentee ballot or by streamline
mail-in ballot will go off without a hitch, and we’ll know the victor fair and square in a matter of a few hours rather than a few months.
My challenge this week is to go further, go past the sound bites, the talking heads, the vitriolic reporters, and get to the source of that emotional Facebook post or trolling tweet or sensational Instagram photo. I won’t share things if I’m not sure they’re credible.
It’s what we teach our kids. It’s what I teach my students: ”Do your homework.” Even my grandkids understand that it’s helpful when they put the extra effort in ahead of time when it comes to
their lessons or to anything worth doing. They know when they do, chances are they’ll be more prepared for the inevitable test.
And, if anything, this election process will be a test on many fronts.
A toast to voters: To doing our homework as a nation. To passing the test.