An enjoyable duty

Today is Election Day. In St. Paul, we have a mildly competitive mayor's race, a School Board race (those are always interesting - people fighting madly for a job that pays $11,000 a year but has enormous power over kids' education) and a referendum about IRV - a voting procedure where you list your top three picks in the order you prefer them.

It's a not a full plate but it's more than enough to get your attention.

I enjoy voting and see it as more than just an offshoot of living in a free country. It's a duty - an enjoyable one - but a duty nonetheless.

The Senate race we had in Minnesota a year ago proves the value of each vote. Al Franken ended up winning by a razor-thin margin. If 313 people in Minnesota had said "To hell with it, my vote doesn't matter", Norm Coleman would still be a senator here. That's 313 people in a state with an estimated population of 5,167,101. According to my calculator, that's a percentage of .0000605.

Pretty slim margin, I'd say.

I understand that today's politics can wear a person out. There are only so many ads you can watch before you want to upchuck. But an active democracy demands participation. So it is incumbent to make some time to get to your polling place. If you don't do so, any arguments you make about the people you could have voted out lack steam. Unlike what some of the TV talkies try to tell us, we always have a chance to have our say in this country. Today is that day.

I remember taking my dear late mother-in-law Colleen to her polling place one voting Tuesday. It was snowing and blowing as only it can here. The building she was voting was barely visible from the street. But she was damned and determined to cast her ballot and called to make sure I was coming at the appointed time. She was, as Hubert Humphrey used to say, pleased as punch to cast her vote.

If she was still alive today, I know she would have cast her vote for whatever was on the ballot in Falcon Heights - even if it was only a race for a seat on The Sewer Board.

That kind of determination and pride is really what this country was founded on. It's up to us to keep the spirit going.