We members of the CR staff are taking seriously our role as swing-state voters. We got up early, braved the final desperate reaching hands of the canvassers outside the polling places, carefully colored within the lines of the Ohio ballot’s rectangles, and now sport snazzy stickers proclaiming that we made a difference. As you wait in line or anticipate the evening news coverage of the election results, we wanted to extend an election day offering: quotes from writers about the valiant act of voting. Happy Election Day!
“In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”
—David Foster Wallace, from the essay “Up Simba”
“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”
—Henry David Thoreau, from “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”
“A great event has recently occurred in our parish. A contest of paramount interest has just terminated; a parochial convulsion has taken place. It has been succeeded by a glorious triumph, which the country—or at least the parish—it is all the same—will long remember. We have had an election; an election for beadle. The supporters of the old beadle system have been defeated in their stronghold, and the advocates of the great new beadle principles have achieved a proud victory.”
—Charles Dickens, from the story “The Election for Beadle”
“In the lack of judgment great harm arises, but one vote cast can set right a house.”
—Aeschylus, from The Eumenides
“Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good: ’Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Come, let us vote against our human nature, / Crying to God in all the polling places / To heal our everlasting sinfulness / And make us sages with transfigured faces.”
—Vachel Lindsay, from “Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket”
“Election Day, November, 1884”
by Walt Whitman
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream:
—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name–the still small voice vibrating–America’s choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen–the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d–sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.
