157. The American Election Process

For the past twenty years or so here in the United States the national elections have often been very close, sometimes so close that they have been contested at the Supreme Court. We have had foreign powers do their best to persuade the American people to vote one way or another, sometimes to great effect. But every time the election has been peaceable, the transfer of power has been accepted and ballots have been recounted over and over. I love this process, no matter how contested it may be at times because we, the people, have agreed to it.

Each state has conducted its election process in slightly different manners from the other states. Some can make the process rather onerous, making voters stand in lines for hours at polling places. Some ballots have been punch-cards that can be easily read by computer scanners, though I believe after the Florida hanging chad fiasco in the Bush-Gore election most states have done away with that type of ballot. Some states require photo identification when you vote. Some states now vote only by mail. Some states require that you register to vote well before the election while others have same day registration.

All states allow absentee voting, though that makes no difference in the states that only vote by mail. Some states require that you declare an acceptable reason to vote in absentia while other states have no such requirements. Certainly, the least restrictive laws regarding voting seem to me to be the most likely places to have the higher turnout.

We also have primary elections to determine who the final nominees from each party will be for the general election. This, of course, makes the voting process long, somewhat annoying, and definitely tiresome. But I think all of this is necessary because of the size and scope of our country. I suppose before all of the media blitz in the old days it was not really so ever present on people’s minds as it is now.

One thing that can be concerning about the election to me is all the focus that gets placed upon the president and vice president while the local offices—those that have the more dramatic effect on people where they live—can be overlooked. Of course, the national media is never going to take the time to cover county commissioner races or even state legislative races, but those offices can wield a great deal of power over the national scene so it is important to stay on top of those local issues. It is always a challenge to keep the public aware of issues so that obfuscation doesn’t blind us to what is really occurring and that’s why staying abreast of the issues is so important to the American democratic process as is the freedom of the press to keep us informed.

I love the American electoral process, though there are things about it that clearly were a compromise by the founding fathers, such as the electoral college. I don’t know how we could do much better with the size and diversity of our country. I also believe that our democracy rests upon the knowledge of we, the people, and it is absolutely essential that we bolster our education system and support our news outlets because any attack against those institutions is likely a subtle way to perform voter suppression which erodes the foundations of this nation.