Why I Vote...With A Lump In My Throat

Yesterday, as we gathered ourselves for a dash to City Hall to vote early, I was casually rooting about in my wallet for my voter registration card.

I found it and, to my abject horror, realized it was the old one.

A genuine wave of panic overcame me in that instant; what if they won't let me vote?

As careful as I've always been, getting my registration updated as I've moved about, making sure to keep track of any precinct changes, staying current on anything pertaining to voting issues - and there I was, just a few days from Election Day, holding an invalid card.

Oy.

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I recall the first Presidential Debates I ever paid attention to as an adult - Jimmy Carter was sparring with Gerald Ford in the fall of 1976, and I was watching it on the teevee in a bar in Groton, Connecticut. Of course, being a young sailor I was only half-interested, but I did watch closely enough to understand that these people were talking about Very Important Things and, being the product of a good civics education and parents who stayed informed by watching the news and discussing things that were going on in the world, it was somewhat of an obligation for me to pay attention.

I've voted in every Presidential and mid-term Congressional election since, with a few exceptions, always with a sense of solemn duty; this is what citizenship is all about, and a citizen in a representative democracy must participate in its governance. This is what I grew up believing, and this is what I impressed upon my own children by taking them to the polls with me, by letting them "push the big green button" to record my choices, by talking about my impressions of the issues and insisting that they develop their own ideas and not simply mimic their parents' take on things.

Now, both of my daughters are more serious about politics than I was at their age - my eldest actually works for a lobbying outfit, in a building a block from the White House, and her younger sister is involved in campus activities of a political bent. Neither are zealots by any stretch, but they do seem to have picked up a good bit of not-so-quiet passion that I apply to my beliefs, and they have both been very active in learning as much as they can about the current candidates for President, and are very excited about their chance to participate in a truly historical event - election of the first black President of The United States.

I couldn't be more proud of my girls.

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My wife and I get to City Hall, and I'm nearly breathless; it keeps going through my mind: what if I can't cast a "normal" vote? What if they make me vote a "provisional" ballot - how can I be sure my vote will count?

All I'd thought about, all the studying, all the reading, all the late-night gnashing of teeth and screaming at spectres of things-we-don't-want-our-country-to-be - and my vote could be left aside, like so many others these past few cycles.

We wait outside in a mercifully short line, then inside for even less time; heart in my throat - literally - I approach the check-in desk and proffer my driver's license (my wife had told me she'd heard from a co-worker that this is the only form of ID that had been required of her; you swipe it in a reader, and your address info is verified against the voter database) with a shaking hand.

Swipe.

Verify.

"Here's your ballot!"

Eureka...

For all who have gone before - I voted.

For all who have sacrificed - soldiers, patriots, civil-rights marchers, workers - I voted.

For the downtrodden, the poor, the abused, those cast aside - I voted.

Not least, for my daughters, for my step-children, for my nieces and nephews, for all the young people who are ourselves, projected into an uncertain future, and to whom we owe this - I voted.

Now, we wait.