How (Now) We Vote

“Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Here in Maine, we near caucus, even as others across the country turn to (or look away from) their primaries. The long, at times, colorful, overflight of hot-air balloons that precedes this actual choosing of balloonists is over. Now, which to pick? How to give that choice a semblance of weight?

Whenever I vote, Henry Thoreau comes to mind, in part because the approach to voting, if one cares, seems to me infinitely complex. But then it simplifies to a “strip of paper.” I must choose one name.

In Maine we express primary choice via that awkward verb, “to caucus,” which the little meaning-checker in my mind invariably switches to “carcass.” Which connects again with Thoreau, who advises that we do more than scratch an X on paper, that we “cast [our] whole vote,” throwing some weight of action and effort behind that vote. Thoreau asks then that we vote with our bodies or…yes, you see it coming…we caucus with our carcasses.

All right, I have had my little fun with the little trickster of language, but what about the weight of voting? Is there a weight and weightiness that surrounds voting, even in this era when the average citizen with her or his average voice feels diminished? Are we making any mark when we vote?

My mind leaps to another weighty moment, and I am reminded of another being (of sorts; also familiar to Thoreau) that scratched its mark across the landscape, leaving sign of its passage and preferred direction.

Long before we began making our marks on this land, the glacier scraped over our region, and, where bedrock’s exposed, we find its signs. How did they get there? The ice, in places thousands of feet thick, carried within it innumerable stones, and those on the bottom surface acted as little gouges on the bedrock that stayed put. Each stone that made its mark was a voice of sorts: “I was here and went this way.”

And, as I vote, I imagine myself as a little stone too, one for now at the place where the body politic grinds over bedrock; I make my mark. And then the glacier politic moves on.

Ice votes

Ice votes

I know Thoreau had in mind much more agency than that; his heroic “I” could, in his mind, throw his weight about in ways that made voting on a “strip of paper” seem trifling. That is the argument of being Civilly Disobedient.

But for this post, I’m wondering about the Xs of voting, and whether this – “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence” – still feels possible, whether you or I, the average Jo or Joe today, is more than a little scratching stone? That seems a voting season’s question.

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