Orel Family

Election Day 2020, outside the precinct: Quiet and peaceful On Election Day in 2016, I walked to my polling place, over a couple streets and down a bike path from my home. I took a snapshot of the empty bikepath. Just a thing of tranquility, with leaves on the ground, a reminder of, as I said at the time, "what my America looks like today." The before times photo, as it were. I've spent some time this evening re-reading what I wrote then :  "Ever since Brexit I felt that Donald Trump was likely to win the election. There were too many single-issue (or nearly single-issue) voters: The voters who would vote Pro-Life. The voters who would vote Gun Rights. The voters who would vote Supreme Court (often in support of Pro-Life or Gun Rights or "Religious Rights"). Too many disaffected, who wanted to hear that magic word: "change." They were going to vote for him so long as he seemed to speak for them, even if he was personally a scoundrel or worse, even...

a local reminder about voters' rights Four years ago, as I walked to my local precinct to vote, I took a picture of the path. My premonition was that the election would not turn out the way most polls were predicting, and I just wanted one peaceful snapshot before things started to change. The next day, I wrote a blog post on my election thoughts, using the title from a Bruce Springsteen song. I called the post, "A Really Long Walk Home." This year, I had no such premonitions, and now that the results are in, and in light of the national direction over the past 46 months, I suppose I could have written a follow-up called, "An Even Longer Walk Home." But my own vantage point has changed in way I couldn't have predicted in 2016. Last year our township clerk contacted me to ask if I might be interested in being an Election Inspector in the November 2019 election. Lori's been working elections for years, and eventually I said "yes."  In March, I si...