'To making it count!'

On my archived blog, “I See My Dreams,” I ran a feature atop my left sidebar titled “daily brief.” Three times in 18 months, I posed in that feature this question:

“What issue always makes headlines a couple of weeks before a general election, then as soon as the polls close goes away?”

Not once did readers of that blog attempt, in comments, to answer that question or even inquire about it.

Well, it’s happened again, and it’s probably the one pre-election story which ticks me off the most.

In the 1960s the Warren Court ruled on a series of cases dealing with "reapportionment," decisions which required electoral districts to have equal populations. In writing the opinion of the Court in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), Chief Justice Earl Warren set forth the principle, “One man, one vote.”

To a younger generation of voters coming along, that principle might seem today “a no-brainer.” But, is it?

Yes, once more, two weeks before Election Day, there are suddenly stories across the nation involving early voting snafus, voting machine foul-ups, long lines where people on lunch breaks are “disenfranchised” because they have to give up and return to work before voting. Machines still not equipped to yield voter-verified paper ballots. Ad nauseam.

These problems might better be dealt with if the media would focus on them at the beginning of an election cycle rather than at its end.

No citizen should leave a polling place wondering, “Did my vote count?”

As my mother used to say, “It’s enough to make a preacher cuss!”