Of hanging chads and junk machines
Voters in 24 states will select their presidential candidates on Super Tuesday, February 5. The cable news stations and even the broadcast stations have set aside some of the endless Britney Spears coverage to speculate 24/7 about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and John McCain or Mitt Romney.
We Floridians voted on January 29, thanks (actually, no thanks) to our Governor, who got caught up in the race to be first and pushed for an early primary for thestate. The Democratic Party said our votes wouldn’t count and the challengers pledged not to campaign here, which was actually a blessing. Who wants to live in an Iowa with high humidity?
Despite being soured on the voting process and equipment in my home state of Florida, I still believe that the Constitutional right of every voter to make his or her voice heard means something. Josef Stalin is said to have commented that “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” Yet part of me still wants to believe that voting is a privilege too many Americans throw away. In other nations, people die for the right to cast a ballot and here it’s more of an inconvenience to those who have the power to change America.
A journalist from one of the former Soviet republics told me in 2007 that she was lucky to have survived five elections. She didn’t mean living through the hassle of counting votes or campaigning: she meant not being assassinated by rival factions in her country during crooked elections. That’s how it is in many parts of the world, while too many Americans don’t even bother to go cast their ballots.
Voting anomalies in 2000 with Florida’s infamous hanging chads and in 2004 with Ohio’s questionable votes for Bush nonetheless, it’s imperative that everyone who can vote does vote. The fact that so many younger voters and their more idealistic elders are supporting Obama is a sign that apathy no longer has to rule in polling places around the nation.
In Florida, the 2008 election will be paper-only, which is perhaps the only thing I can thank Florida’s Governor Show Pony for. The touchscreens that caused such a disparate count in Sarasota County’s Congressional election in 2006 will be mercifully scrapped. Counties that spent millions for a system that the majority of voting activists mistrusted were offered a buy-back deal of $1 per machine from the same greedy manufacturer that sold them the equipment at inflated prices. Now the three companies certified to provide voting equipment in Florida will have new optical scanners and other accessories to sell to the same counties in our state. Good luck with that!
If you live in a Super Tuesday state, vote. Even if there isn’t a candidate you would totally support, do it the name of the all those around the world who are blessed when they literally survive an election or who have no elections at all.
