Election of all elections

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In terms of how this election has gone, the U.S. has never seen an election like this ever before, much like the last one set the precedent before that.

Interest in Americans getting out the vote has only continued to peak in recent years, and it is truly a testament for how effective the democratic process has been for the general American populace. Knowing that there are so many people who feel the desire to contribute to the overall direction of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth is a considerably awe-inspiring prospect.

In previous elections, turnouts were typically around anemic level of 30 to 40 percent of all registered voters, while many other democratic countries in Europe have been more robust with more than half of registered voters for the better part of the last 30 years. For the U.S., it was only with the 2000 elections that we have seen half of the registered voters show up at the polls, and election officials on the local, state, and national levels could not even figure out how to handle the huge amounts of ballots cast.

The election debacle of 2000 has certainly set the precedent for how every subsequent election after it has and will be conducted. The need for early voting cannot be stressed enough, since counting all of these votes will take several pots of coffee and the steely resolve for participating in the hands-on dealings of the electoral process.

Standing in line myself Tuesday morning, I truly drank in the importance of what I was involved in, and I was enjoying all the other people ahead and behind me for how they shared what I thought about this election. If there is something we all can take away with from this election, win or lose, it should be the notion that American democracy is alive and well.

Our Founding Fathers may have had differing thoughts about what the original Thirteen Colonies should become after winning independence, ranging from establishing a new monarchy to leaving the Thirteen Colonies to fend for themselves. Of course, the best thing that our earliest leaders did for us was offering all Americans to vote for creating the federal system of government that set the groundwork for how voting for any political office would be carried out for generations to come.

Now that the electoral process has had nearly a quarter of a millennium now to germinate into the staggeringly massive and important duty that all Americans share, it is also important to educate our future generations about the importance of voting when their time comes. Knowing that we are a nation that encourages our children to learn from our parents, voting should remain one of the most important things we can share. We really owe it to them, if nothing else.