Close to Voting Time

In yesterday's mail my absentee ballot arrived for the May election here in Ohio. There's a local issue I'm really going to support and vote for: funding for the public library. How could I ever vote against that?

I couldn't.

My parents (both teachers) taught me never to vote against a school issue. I never did. And, later, when I was a teacher myself, I saw the consequences of NO votes. I didn't just see them; I felt them--as did the students. Larger classes, decline in funding for supplies and textbooks and school activities, etc. Some years it was awfully grim.

There's a lot of talk these days (talk is a generous word for some of the vitriol I read in newspapers, see online and on TV) about making voting more difficult in order to, you know, eliminate voter fraud--a condition that all reasonable research reveals just doesn't really exist--certainly not in the massive numbers that losers of elections claim. And much (most?) of what occurs is accidental.

If I lived in some of these states that are clamping down on voting, I couldn't vote. There is no way I could stand in line for hours; I couldn't really stand in line for minutes. I grow so dizzy so fast that I would hit the floor very quickly. And, of course, I think about my mother, who died at 98, who was basically immobile the latter years of her life but still voted absentee all those years. As did my father, who died at 87 and had the same voting experiences.

I think of people who don't have easy access to transportation, who can't get away from work to stand for hours somewhere, of people who are out of town--or the country--on business, of people who ... those pictures I’ve seen on the news of people in wheelchairs in endless lines were just wrenching ...

Meanwhile, I think with gratitude how easy Ohio makes it for voters--and I think of my mother and father, totally immobile, still sharp mentally, lying on their backs in their Massachusetts care facility and filling in their ballots over the years. And how grateful I am that Massachusetts made it easy for them to so because that state still believes in democracy--and democracy means "majority rule," not “minority manipulation.”

And, of course, many of the politicians who bellow about “in-person voting” do not vote in person.

Of course we need to make elections secure (we do)—of course we must make certain that our results are as accurate as possible.

But we also must make certain that it is not an ordeal to vote. Yes, it’s a privilege, but it’s also a right. And not everyone has the leisure, the transportation, the health, etc. to comply with our ever-more draconian voting regulations. It’s hard enough trying to overcome the gerrymandering of which both parties have been guilty.