Today I put my job as an writer on hold. I’ve already informed Murphy Jones that we will work on his blog post tomorrow. Today, I’ll head to the county election office to help with counting ballots. I consider such civic duty more important than my efforts to put the right words into the right order on the work in progress. I’m sure Mabel Schmidel and her gang of old ladies will understand. If they were real people, they would undoubted be helping at polling places themselves. Across the country, such work is often done by senior citizens who are retired and have the flex time for a day that starts at 6 AM and ends after 8 PM. We were all raised with that concept of civic duty.

Here in Texas, we have 14 constitutional amendments to decide. They cover a wide array of topics. For some, I question why the entire state needs to vote on the actions of a single county. Shouldn’t that be a county vote? For others, the wording is twisted in ways that make the entire amendment hard to interpret. As I understand it, that is an issue for many of the state elections across the country. Whoever is writing items for the ballots needs to stop turning them into statements of, “Yes we have no bananas.” Making sense of our political system is hard enough as it is. Elections really are essential parts of our democratic system. It all starts with your vote.