Privacy in Voting Is a Treasure

Styrofoam partitions at the polling place comforted me. Our polling place is a cinder block community center in a very small town in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I also liked the black curtain around the machine where I fed my ballot. I liked the privacy and dignity partitions and black curtains provided. Men came in their trucks and work clothes, taking time off jobs to vote; women held their small children by the hand as they entered.

“You didn’t vote for him, did you?” people asked this election season and in 2016. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if he wins.” An independent for many years, I’m not registered with either of the main political parties since the US government’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East and Africa, under both Republicans and Democrats. Many people I knew wildly erected Obama yard signs in 2008 when he ran against John McCain. Curious, I wandered to our downtown and picked up some Obama campaign literature. Ramping up military spending and proliferating US military bases in other countries were listed as two of his priorities.

I didn’t like McCain either, but I just couldn’t put up an Obama sign. Obama became known during his administration for compiling assassination lists, for drone bombing suspected “terrorists,” including a 16-year-old American teenager, under the Authorization to Use Military Force in Afghanistan, legislation that gave a free pass and open funding to any US military action anywhere in the world without Congressional approval. I had voted independent even before that terrible legislation that was blessed and funded by both Democrats and Republicans.

Even before this recent horribly contentious election, I believed people should be able to keep their votes private if they chose to. Partitions and curtains are there for good reason. People have lost jobs, been discriminated against, not hired, and been threatened in this country and around the world for who they voted for or for trying to vote at all. They have been forced overtly or covertly to vote for certain candidates. They have been barred from voting. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 inspires me. It states, “no person . . .shall intimidate, threaten, coerce. . . any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] person to vote or to vote as he may choose.” 

Almost 77 million people voted for Donald Trump in this last election, and he earned most of the states’ Electoral College votes, yet major media outlets published headlines like “What Trump Unleashed Means for America” on MSNBC (Nov. 8) and “You Can’t Despair Because That’s What They Want” in the Nov. 8 edition of Rolling Stone. Who is the “you” in this headline, and who is the “they?” Media language like this condescends and insults those 77 million people, whatever we may think of Donald Trump as a politician or now as the President-elect. Maybe such posturing and language caused the Democratic Party’s failure.

No one likes to be treated, spoken to, or spoken about with contempt as though they are so dumb and misinformed, they don’t know any better. The Atlantic trumpeted on Nov. 8, “The Case for Treating Trump Like a Normal President.” The Atlantic has continued, even in 2023, to stand by its lies about weapons of mass destruction that justified the US government’s invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq. Most major media outlets championed those war lies and many more Covid period lies. 

From church email lists after the election, I received messages about “grieving,” and notes that if anyone needed counseling or a place to pray, clergy would be available. Trump won the popular vote in this election – with Republicans winning the popular vote for the first time since 2004. What message do these church-grieving and garment-rending comments send to those 77 million people all over the country? What are we missing? I like the dignity and privacy of polling place partitions and curtains to protect against voter discrimination, in workplaces, neighborhoods, and especially, in churches.

Churches should not endorse or reject candidates, either overtly or by implication, and should remain separate from political party politics as these associations conjure memories of bad times in our history when church was a capital “C,” working alongside government, to demand tithes, imprison people for not attending Church, or for not acting as the Church and State dictated. In the past, the Church used government’s power and force to intimidate and repress. Which churches sent grieving emails post-election and which did not? Don’t we pray for everyone? Open doors to everyone, regardless of political party or whom we voted for? Or, is that unless someone voted for “him?” What are we learning from this period?

Church with a capital “C” may remind us of Science with a capital “S,” with all the harms. The Science perpetrated during lockdowns and over the last few years. In addition, media took on a capital “M.” Media outlets claimed their assertions were the only valid ones, the only Truths (there’s that capital letter again), and then colluded with governments to censor alternative opinions and information while bullying, slandering, threatening, and deplatforming writers and speakers with alternative views, many of which have proven to be correct.

During this terrible time, noble, highly credentialed people lost friends and family, jobs and careers, reputations and benefits, including firefighters and other public servants, doctors and health care professionals, and people from many fields, for their speech when it did not align with The Science or when they declined an experimental shot.

Democrats’ loss took on a new iteration recently when Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was appointed to head the National Institute of Health. Bhattacharya, along with Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, authored the Great Barrington Declaration that opposed school closures and lockdowns. These experts said barring children from in-person school was a “grave injustice.” They opposed forced experimental shots. Media spread cruel language about these authors and their supporters, as well as many others, for merely speaking out with compassion, critical thinking, and common sense.

Capital letter organizations garnered too much power and made assumptions about what we, everyone beneath them, must think and believe and do. Capital letter institutions took on lives of their own and assumed superiority. Corporations with a capital “C” subsumed and destroyed small businesses, including many African-American businesses, all over the country. Many restaurants and in-person service businesses, like nail and hair salons, massage centers, yoga studios closed for good. Small churches, especially in rural areas, collapsed when they could not survive declining memberships after governments ordered their doors shuttered.

Jesus may not have wanted a church with a capital “C,” that endorses or rejects politicians, as he walked dusty country sides, accompanied by his growing band of ragamuffins and misfits, those who challenged dominant narratives and powerful figures of their time. Radical sects broke from the Church of England and the Catholic Church, rejecting powers implied in the capital “C” church tied to the state, which rallied behind military invasions and conquests, forced memberships and payments.

What are the capital letter institutions missing – the Church, the Media, the Science, the Corporations, the Pharmaceutical Companies? What have they missed for years and especially these last few years after the 2020 lockdowns? Answers may help us understand the election’s outcome. Ask a small business owner, one of all the many relying on live communities to survive. Ask the owner of a restaurant that a family built over generations that was forced to close during lockdowns because it couldn’t survive unconstitutional government mandates or reduced capacity edicts – or the cruel societal and biased media backlash if it tried opening earlier than virtue-signaling or societal peer pressure allowed. During that strange and terrible time after 2020 descended, those favoring reopening businesses or schools were maligned as “reckless” or “homicidal.”

Who are these 77 million people who voted for “him,” and why don’t so-called mainstream reporters ask them more questions? Ask the postman, the UPS driver, the guy coming to your house to get the electricity going for laptop computers, the farmer down the road, the truck driver, eating at the truck stop diner, who drives the truck transporting what we order from the internet. Ask the servicemember, sent to one of those disastrous wars for lies and profits. Ask the truck drivers who transported vegetables, meat, and spices, used at the restaurant making meals that people computer-clicked and then had delivered by Grubhub or Uber Eats while staying home because the New York Times told us to. 

Ask the chicken factory worker who produced the chicken for the Grubhub meal or the machinist who built the engine parts in the car driven by the Grubhub driver. Ask them who they voted for. Maybe ask them why. Ask the mechanic who maintained the truck, transporting Amazon orders for people “working from home;” ask the guy coming to your house to pump the septic tank while people stayed in their houses, drawing salaries from Zoom meetings. No one likes to be referred to as an ignorant slob who doesn’t know any better about whom to vote for, what shots to take, whether or not he can gather with friends, attend church, or go to an AA meeting inside.

DC bureaucrats may not have minded lockdown and stay-at-home “orders,” maybe even liked them, because they still drew excellent salaries without having to commute. I have commuted to work into DC from Virginia and Maryland suburbs. It’s exhausting and nerve-wracking. It’s better to stay home. It’s also privileged. I’m not surprised DC bureaucrats and high-paid media figures promoted, defended, and prolonged lockdown policies that devastated communities and families all over the country. Devastation spread across the world because other countries often follow the US lead.

Where were voters and how did they feel when lights went out in children and teenagers’ eyes from school closures and bizarre Covid policies, forced on them for a disease that posed almost no threat to them? Public schoolteachers continue dealing with the damage politicians and bureaucrats inflicted on schoolchildren and adolescents. College students tell stories of police showing up at their dorm rooms when they gathered with friends. Many of my mom’s friends described terrible mental health crises among their adolescent and young adult children – from near-catatonic depression to suicidal ideation to suicidal attempts that required hospitalizations. Some lost their precious children to suicide.

Did bureaucrats and politicians promote harmful policies because they didn’t get adequate information – or did they just not care as long as they could get gourmet ice cream delivered to their house? They may never have read an article or heard a talk from former Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. because they operate in a completely different “information ecosystem,” as he phrased it. Censorship divided information ecosystems, snuffed out entire ones from public view, so people may never have read or heard certain information to provoke more critical thinking, to learn from new and uncomfortable angles. 

Media with a capital “M,” which largely supports the Democratic Party, dismissed Kennedy as a discredited kook and still does. How was that fair? He comes from a prominent political family with a long Democratic Party history, earned an Ivy League education, and, as an attorney, successfully sued some of the country’s most powerful corporations. Why would Big Media not give him air time for interviews? Why not treat him with basic respect and decency, even if you disagreed with his ideas? Largely because of his opposition to Media censorship, he said, he joined the Trump campaign.

Why did the Democratic Party refuse security protection for RFK, Jr. when he ran as a Democrat? Isn’t that one of the rules of the game – that presidential candidates get Secret Service protection? Maybe not playing by the rules contributed to their loss? Why would major networks not interview him? Which ideas were not discussed at all during the election season?

At my polling place, I valued my privacy when completing a ballot behind a partition and then feeding it into the machine with a black curtain around it. I have been independent for a long time but couldn’t help but wonder this time why the Democratic Party seemed so surprised that it lost.