6 days Ago By Mark Franke Columnist
Now that election day is a week into the past, almost an epoch in the American attention span, some retrospection is in order. I stayed true to my election day ritual. At 5:35 a.
m. I followed a neighbor out of our addition to the precinct polling place to stand in line waiting for the doors to open. After hearing friends complain about two and three hour waits to vote early because apparently everyone had the same idea, I expected things to be rather deserted at the polls.
Not so. There were about 50 people already lined up ahead of me, the most I have experienced in my 25 years of voting there. Even more surprising was the 50 or more behind me by the time the doors opened at 6:00.
I had a flight out of Fort Wayne at 9:00 so I wondered if I could make it, given the reports from early voting times. I was out the door at 6:15 a.m.
The efficiency of the precinct poll workers was truly impressive. There were a lot of people I couldn’t recall seeing in previous elections. Clearly there was a heightened interest level in this election.
Voting data for my home county of Allen don’t reflect a higher interest, though; fewer votes were cast in 2024 than in 2020 but more than in 2016. I will let the data wonks sort that one out, and I am sure they will try. I can add only one datapoint: I didn’t see many yard signs in my addition this year.
And did I mention that it was drizzling as we stood outside waiting for the doors to open? November rain is never fun but people didn’t seem to mind. The conversations were cheerful and strictly non-political. We were neighbors, after all, and a little rain wasn’t going to spoil the experience.
We all understood the importance of what we were doing. Even though I claim to despise politics in its current debased form, I still stay up on election night until a winner is announced. This year it was until Pennsylvania was called, well after midnight.
Between the election and the World Series, I have experienced some serious sleep deprivation the past several weeks. My first experience with pulling an all-nighter was in 1960. I listened to the radio most of the night while the commentators were trying to figure out why no results were being reported from Chicago.
My fourth-grade teacher forgave my drowsiness the next day and I eventually learned about the Daley machine’s creative vote counting. The mists of memory about 1960 drew me back into previous presidential elections and how successful I have been in voting for the winner. My record is 7-6-1: seven winning candidates, six losers and one tie, the tie being a protest vote for a third-party candidate who obviously lost.
Full disclosure demands I admit to being 7-7, not bowl-eligible. Two things can be learned from my record. First, don’t ask me for advice on voting.
Flipping a coin gives you the same odds as my opinion. More important is the validation of the resilience of our democratic polity. Stable democracies can tolerate and even strengthen themselves with frequent government changes.
It is one more defense against both despotism and anarchy. Even the rash of sore losers who refuse to concede or who question the legitimacy of election results can’t breach our constitutional foundations. No thinking person in America wants one-party rule, and our system looks to the voters to prevent that.
Does the voting public still hold sovereignty in America? Reviewing my adulthood’s 14 elections suggests a positive answer to that question. • In eight of the 14, the incumbent party lost to the challenger party. What happened to the proverbial home field advantage? • Four sitting presidents lost their reelection bids, although five prevailed.
• Vice presidents were able to succeed to the White House only once in four attempts. If we include all the presidential elections in my lifetime, two more vice presidents lost. Perhaps the most memorable thing of that morning was standing in line with a college student who came home to vote in her first election.
She was excited about being able to cast her vote alongside her parents and neighbors. The only downer for her was having to listen to me drone on about my first election, which was probably back in the stone age for her. Still, she was polite about it.
When she checked in, the poll worker asked if this was her first election. She responded affirmatively and the poll work announced loudly that we had a first-time voter. People applauded.
That’s American democracy in action. I think we can feel confident that our democracy will survive despite the “sky is falling” predictions of the doomsayers. Just listen to that applause instead.
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