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The Personal Satisfaction Of Helping Write History

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 4, 2008

The election today is one for the history books and people in all walks of life sense it.

"I voted" stickers are being worn on the shirts and blouses of voters who marked their ballots days ago. We have heard no one griping that their vote just won't matter this year.

The nation is deeply divided, highly motivated and the whole world is watching.

Here in Florida, a key battleground state, some 4.2 million of us have already voted early or absentee, which is about 38 percent of the total voter rolls. That doesn't mean you should expect turnout at the polls today to be light. Participation is on track to break records, and lines are likely to be long.

Remember that Florida is using paper ballots, not touch-screen machines. You fill in circles with a black pen and drop your ballot into an actual box.

Many people will be voting for the first time and others will be confused by the change in procedure. Polls open at 7 a.m., and it would be smart to vote as early in the day as possible. The lines could be long when polls close at 7 p.m.

A bill changing elections to a weekend-long event is being proposed in Congress by Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York. He wants to have a two-day election weekend in November instead of a one-day election on a Tuesday. Long delays today will build support for that and similar reforms designed to make voting easier.

We Americans are the biggest critics of our own voting process. As the Manila (Philippines) Bulletin notes, "The U.S. presidential elections is a study in the orderly conduct of party nominations, candidate campaigns and the conduct of the elections itself."

It's not that some people don't try to corrupt the process. Authorities have uncovered many irregularities, including evidence of an attempt to register the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada. The motive was almost certainly to cheat the employer paying for the registration drive.

Americans demand that their elections be clean and fair, and overwhelmingly they are. An editorial in The Jakarta (Indonesia) Post says that most of the world knows who it wants to win, but laments that "once again, our opinions don't count ... If the rest of the world cannot influence the outcome, at the very least, we can rejoice with Americans for putting on such a fine show of liberal democracy."

The newspaper is right, except that what we're putting on is so much more than a show. In every corner of the nation, it's the real thing. Today, through the selection of our next president, we confirm that the value of each free "I voted" sticker is incalculable.

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