Monday, July 24, 2023

Election Day 2022

Got to walk to our polling place and exercise my voting privilege.

Even Gordon Tullock would have approved of my voting today, since I got to vote for myself!  (NC Senate District 13)

It was crowded, but the line was negligible, two people at each of two different stations to be identified and then to get the ballot.

On every election day, I am often reminded of Emerson's 1844 observations of watching folks go to vote. That's almost 180 years ago, but it rings true now.

At least, it rings true to me. 

I remember standing at the polls one day, when the anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and a good man at my side looking on the people, remarked, "I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean to vote right." I suppose, considerate observers looking at the masses of men, in their blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “New England Reformers,” 1844.

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