Today is Election Day, the last day of a long period as Americans vote. I’d rather call this “DEMOCRACY DAY”.
As I write this, the ballots have been coming in by the millions - 57 million Americans have already voted, and more are lining up at polling stations now.
Here in Michigan, 2.3 million have voted (about one-third of all Michigan voters). In Idaho, over 250,00 votes were in by the end of last month, while Texas voters had submitted 7.7 million votes.
I will spend this day as I have for the past Election Days. I’ll be in a room with Democrats and Republicans, opening absentee ballot envelopes and counting the votes. We’ll be checking every ballot for legitimacy (does the ballot number and voter name match our records?), making every ballot anonymous before we take it out of its “secrecy sleeve”, feeding it into the tabulator to be counted, checking any ballots that are rejected (one Democrat and one Republican reviewing and correcting the problem, recording the event), then counting and double-counting everything so we have the right number of ballots and envelopes, nothing’s missing, nothing’s stolen, nothing extra is added.
We’ll bundle the ballots up, knowing that no one can look at these ballots and know who cast it. And we’ll bundle the envelopes up, knowing that anyone can tell who voted but can’t tell who they voted for. Secret ballots from beginning to end.
And everyone will sign their name to everything they did. Democrats and Republicans working together for democracy.
We Believe that America is a democracy, by and for the people… That’s our Democratic Creed. This is how we live the Democratic Creed - in the counting room on Election Day.
Proud to do my part. And proud of you for doing your part - voting in a democracy.
We believe.
