No judgment here if you skip the first box Tuesday

Matt Pearl

Our time is up.

We will immediately be faced with the prospect of selecting a new leader for this nation. A new President of the United States will be elected, and our choice for chief executive of this great nation will set the course for the next few years of America’s future.

I have literally never been less excited to pick between two candidates than I am right now. But I intend to go to the polls Tuesday and cast my ballot.

Do I have a strategy? Yes. I’ll not share it with you, however: there are aspects of my life and logic that I prefer to keep to myself.

When I turned 18 in 1996 and voted in that year’s big election, I filled out my ballot with excitement and hope. Part of that was youth, and the newness of participating in the electoral process.

And part of it was the choices. And the fact that both candidates – Clinton and Dole that year – seemed pretty committed to working across the aisle in Congress and making meaningful strides toward solutions to America’s problems. I gain no sense of such a desire from our current two frontrunners.

So now voting is the one thing I was hopeful it would never become for me – a chore.

That’s right, and you can judge me to your heart’s content. You and I are faced with voting either for a man whose words and attitudes reflect those fit for a boss or a CEO, but hardly for a polished politician; or for a liar, whose scandal-fraught career would seemingly make her unfit to run for President, much less receive her party’s nomination.

Please don’t be too offended when I call Donald Trump brash or obnoxious: but if he talked about a female member of my family the way he talked about women in general on the leaked “locker room talk” tape, I would be highly offended–and angry.

And when I call Hillary Clinton a liar, I only do so because of several notable, documented instances when she changed her story–sometimes, as in this email scandal that won’t go away, she changed her story several times. That’s unacceptable.

Or I guess you can vote for Gary Johnson. Whichever of the other two eventually wins will thank you for your loyalty to the Libertarian Party. Maybe you can get on the party mailing list or get a bumper sticker for your trouble.

And so we vote and hope for the best. There are other issues on the ballot, right?

I was encouraged by someone I really respect to endorse the parks, soils and water tax renewal issue and I do so. I like nice things, and I don’t mind paying for them; it’s a tax renewal that you and I are already paying, and this measure just continues it.

The rest of the propositions and amendments sound pretty dicey. When you have to spend hours trying to decode its language or decide if YES means the affirmative or the negative, you’re generally looking at a politicized issue. I’m not afraid to vote YES when the cause is pleasing to me and (in my opinion) beneficial to Missouri, but I typically vote NO on many proposed “improvements” to our state’s laws or constitution.

Many of the names appearing on local ballots come from individuals who either were unopposed in the primary, or who survived their competition in the primary for an unopposed finish this coming Tuesday. But votes count, and we need to participate in the democratic process. I won’t judge you if you skip the first box, though.