Virginia Elections

I admit, with a fair amount of guilt, that I did not vote today in Virginia's gubernatorial and state house elections, even though on previous occasions, I have implored others to vote whenever possible. I simply could not bring myself to vote for a candidate who had views that are abhorrent to me in a deepest possible way, and since all candidates held at least one such view, well, there you have it. My equivalent of a vote of disapproval of all.

We realize that mathematically, the idea that each individual's single vote will affect the outcome of an election is absurd. I should concede here that if every voter took the previous sentence to heart, the system would collapse. But still, that is not why we vote, or at least not why I do. As I've said before, I vote because I can, while many millions of people around the world cannot, and because it is an opportunity to make a gesture of approval for a certain set of ideas and principles. The gesture is mostly to myself -- I don't go around shouting the names of the candidates I voted for and why I chose them. Still, I see it as a moral responsibility to make that gesture.

Needless to say, this becomes impossible when the likelihood of finding such a set of ideas and principles embodied in the stated opinions of a single candidate is pretty much nil. Yes, politics is the art of the possible, we've been told a thousand times, and that you pick the least of all evils, that you vote for the candidate whose "bad part" is less objectionable than the others'. And there have been occasions in the past where I have done that. But there is a limit. I believe that it is possible to reach a level of objectionableness beyond which my moral principles do not allow me to go, and I have reached it this year. Let's hope that for our society's sake, that does not become a pattern, though I frequently fear it it might.