To my fellow Americans:
I am not writing to tell you how to vote. I have opinions, and I have set a great many of them down in this space across the past year, and none of them is the subject here. The subject is the act itself, which belongs to neither party, cannot be done on your behalf, and takes about as long as a haircut.
There will be an election on November 3. That part is statute rather than forecast. The Federal Election Commission calls it “the next regularly scheduled federal General Election date,” and it will arrive whether or not either of us is ready. Everything else about the day is open: who wins the House, who holds the Senate, how long the counting takes, whether the side that loses behaves as though losing is survivable.
One thing is not open, and it is the only part of the day that belongs to you alone.
Let me state the premise plainly, because a letter that hides its premise is a sales pitch. I believe this November may be the closest thing to a free and fair election that we will see for a generation. I hope I am wrong. I would rather be wrong about this than right, and I have been wrong about plenty, so the hope is not vanity. But I have spent the year reading the documents rather than the commentary, and the documents describe machinery under strain: a federal commission that certifies voting equipment left without a quorum since July, a large state with no statutory deadline for its own certification, an observer regime being rewritten in courtrooms rather than in legislatures. I wrote the long version of this in September (Run Correctly, Disbelieved Anyway), at greater length than most people will want to read, and the argument of that piece was that the danger is not theft but belief. A count does not have to be stolen to stop settling anything. It only has to be doubted by enough people at once.
Which brings me to the reason for this letter, and to the only lever in the whole apparatus that moves because a private citizen pulls it.
The instruction
A vote is not a bet on a winner. Most votes are cast for candidates who will lose, and every vote is cast without knowing the result. What a ballot actually does is smaller and more important than picking a winner. It instructs the loser to accept the count.
Read that again, because it is the whole trick of the American system and it took the species an unreasonable amount of blood to learn. Government changes hands here without violence not because the right side always wins, but because the side that loses agrees in advance that the counting, rather than the contest, decides. Every ballot cast is a signature on that agreement. Every abstention is a name withheld from it, which is why the habit of voting matters even to people who expect to lose: the habit is the agreement, and the agreement is what makes losing an option rather than a catastrophe.
Low turnout does not merely hand the election to whoever shows up. It thins the number of people who have personally endorsed the count, and it hands the doubters their best argument: that the result belongs to someone else’s coalition, in a country where nearly everyone is someone else.
What it costs
I am not going to pretend the hour is free. It is a real hour. In some places it is four of them, in a line, in whatever weather the first week of November has arranged. It is a shift given up, a ride arranged, a child handed to a neighbor. The cost falls unevenly, and the people who pay the most often have the least to spare, which is one of the quieter scandals of how this country runs its elections.
What is also true, and said less often, is that most of the obstacles people fear are smaller than the fear. Most states offer early in-person voting, mail ballots, or both, and most states let you register online (vote.gov). In some states you may register as late as Election Day itself; in others the door closes thirty days out, and that deadline, rather than any obstacle at the polling place, is the thing that most often defeats people who fully intended to vote.
The cost of abstaining is not zero either. It is simply deferred, and paid by other people, and paid later.
The ask
Four things, and none of them requires you to agree with me about anything.
Check your registration this week. Not on November 2. Right now, while you are reading a letter you did not expect, because the deadline is the trap and the trap closes quietly. It takes about two minutes at the link above.
Make a plan. A day, a place, a way to get there. An intention is not a plan, and the distance between them is where most of the people who meant to vote lose their votes. Decide the hour now, while it costs you nothing, and write it down somewhere you will see it.
Take one person with you. Think of the name now. Not a category of person. A name. The one who says every year that it does not matter, or who has moved twice since the last election and is not sure the registration followed.
Vote for whomever you believe, and then accept the count. I mean this literally, including the part that costs more than the other three combined. If your side wins, accept it without pretending the other half of the country is illegitimate. If your side loses, accept it without pretending the count was stolen. That acceptance is not a favor you do your opponents. It is the thing you are asking them to do in return, four years from now or two, and it is the only reason any of us can afford to keep losing.
I have written a great deal this year about what is being done to the machinery. I have written less about the fact that the machinery is not self-operating. It runs on the participation of people who could stay home, who have reasons to stay home, and who come anyway. That is the whole of it. A republic is not kept by the people who win. It is kept by the people who lose and come back.
To my fellow Americans, then, and not to my fellow partisans: we are not enemies. We are neighbors who disagree, in a country built on the bet that disagreement can be survived if the counting is shared. On November 3, share it. Bring someone. Then let the count decide, and let the country go on being worth an argument.
Philip
PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman