The system may be imperfect, but I will still vote

Unlike a lot of folks, I did not cast my ballot in the upcoming election early. I like voting on Election Day.

There are those who appreciate the convenience of early voting, but my reasoning is: voting shouldn’t be "convenient." It should require a conscious, thoughtful effort to go out of your way to cast your ballot.

The sad part is, I and many others have lost a lot of faith in our electoral system, because so many disrespect it and abuse it.

Unlike a majority of those who are voting in this election, I gave six years of my life in military service to defend this nation; most voters have done nothing to support their country. Many of them, in fact, spend their lives figuring out ways to abuse the very liberties my fellow veterans and I bought them.

Nonetheless, I will vote.

By and large, I’m considered to be a fairly conservative chap. While one of the two major parties leans that way and more often than not I support that party’s candidates, I steadfastly maintain that I am an independent, not a party loyalist.

I retain no respect for those who wander into the voting booth and punch a straight-party ballot, for either party, because it means they’re too lazy to actually study all the candidates and all the issues they’re voting on.

It wouldn’t bother me to see that option removed from the voting process. It cheapens your vote, and makes it all too easy for the two major parties to exclude minor parties and independents from the electoral process.

Nonetheless, I will vote.

There are those who maintain that voting for all the candidates of a party shows your support for that party’s platform. That may be so.

Yet we’ve seen here in Texas that individual candidates ignore their own party’s platform whenever it’s convenient: hence, we still have a U.S. Department of Education despite two terms in office from a certain Mr. Bush, whose party platform proposed eliminating it.

Nonetheless, I will vote.

I am under no delusions that the ballot I will cast in Tuesday’s general election will actually count. Despite the major news media’s willful malpractice in declining to report on the issue, voter fraud is widespread, and growing.

The vote I will cast on Tuesday will be negated by dead voters, unregistered voters, illegal aliens, mail ballots filled in by campaign workers and persons riding in bus caravans to cast multiple ballots in multiple locations. We’ve seen it here in Gonzales County, and you can bet it’s even more rampant in more populous areas like San Antonio, Dallas, Austin and Houston.

Nonetheless, I will vote.

Worse than the fraud are those who will blindly cast their ballots without ever having considered who they’re voting for— people who vote for or against certain candidates simply because of their skin color or religion.

We eliminated literacy tests and other requirements because they were considered "discriminatory" — and that made it all too easy for the unscrupulous politicians to corral the ignorant to vote en masse for whoever promises the most "free government stuff."

As Alexander Tyler is credited with observing:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship."

Nonetheless, I will vote.

Unlike a lot of folks, I will cast a vote in every race on the ballot in which I have educated myself about the candidates. While the presidential race is important, county commissioners and judges to the Criminal Courts of Appeal have a lot more direct impact on what happens in our everyday world.

It is sad that many folks only exercise their duty to vote once every four years, for that reason. How many times have we seen municipal or county-level elections with fewer than a thousand votes cast here in Gonzales County, but there are four times that turnout for a presidential election?

As it happens, I’m not very happy with any of the candidates available to us at the top of the ballot. I may vote my conscience, and write in my choice.

There are some out there who maintain that not voting for this or that major candidate helps elect the other guy, that you’re wasting your vote. There’s a mathematical logic to that argument.

But voting isn’t supposed to be logical: it’s about your conscience. Your vote should reflect your personal beliefs, whether those beliefs coincide with the Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens or none of the above.

Our system is imperfect. Nonetheless, I will vote.