As we get closer toward election, I read the controversy about election fraud taking place and recall my experience with voting in five different Texas counties over my lifetime.
In each of the voting places I encountered similar type administrators who were working as a public service and took their job seriously using great pains to ensure each procedure and question were properly performed.
Generally, in a presidential election we are lucky if 55% of eligible voters actually vote. In Texas in order to exclude minorities and poor whites from voting we had what is called a poll tax from 1902 to 1964 that was $1.75 per person which was the equivalent to $65 today. Imagine today that a couple had to pay $130 each year in order to vote. I remember my mother and father discussing the burden of spending this money when working wages were 75¢ per hour. In the deep South instead of the poll tax reading tests and violence were used to keep minorities from voting.
Remembering how broad the right to vote has been expended since the founding of the country, each of us should recognize what a privilege it is to vote. very time there is an election, I go vote and if they ever make dogcatcher an elected office, I will go vote on that. The bottom line is that when you get ready to punch that vote button the poorest man in America is equal to the richest man in America. He may have contributed millions to elect his preferred candidate and with one finger you can cancel his vote if you disagree.
