Rebecca Makkai

Because you shouldn’t throw your vote away

I don’t know any “undecided” voters—are they real?—and I don’t think someone like me can convince a right-winger to switch sides. But I know many people to the Left of Kamala who are torn between voting for her, abstaining, and voting for a third-party candidate. Those people have been on my mind a lot.

Here’s how my father and his friends used to vote in 1950s Hungary, where election results were preordained: They’d make an “X” on one thumb with an inky, black marker. Then they’d bring their own pen to the voting place, filled with disappearing ink. You had no booth to hide in, and election officials would watch you. Vote for the wrong candidate, and your name could wind up on a list. So, they’d mark the “correct” box with disappearing ink, lick their thumbs, and—as they folded the ballot in half and put it in the ballot box—transfer that inky “X” to the spot they actually wanted. This was extremely dangerous, all of it.

But my point here is not about the satisfaction of the protest vote. It’s instead about not taking your vote for granted, not treating it so lightly that you might toss it around just to make yourself feel better. My father and his friends knew that their only hope was to make this one very small statement. Had they been given the chance to cast an actual, critical vote for the future of their country, they would never have dreamed of throwing that vote away because the better candidate was imperfect.

Kamala Harris is the one viable candidate who will listen to progressives, who can be pressured and swayed by progressives. In whatever area you deem her opinions and policies questionable or downright bad—US support of Israel will come to mind for many—ask yourself if there’s a route to pressuring her, once she’s in office, to come closer to your own position. Because she’s a reasonable person—a formidably intelligent person—and a career public servant, I believe there is. Because Trump is an irrational agent of chaos and a megalomaniac, I believe that for him, there is not.

While there are issues on which she’s swerved to the Right (fracking, for one), there are others where she’s been successfully pulled to the Left (decriminalization of border crossings). If you think there’s a chance of Trump being pulled to the Left on any of his current positions, I have some crappy steaks and a degree from a fake university to sell you.

“If we do not know our own history,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.”

Vote like you just earned the right to vote. For those of us who aren’t white men, and for those who grew up under a totalitarian regime like many in my family, that’s in fact true. Vote like your vote is the deciding vote in the election. Who’s to say it won’t be? Vote like people’s lives and rights are in your hands. They are.

Rebecca Makkai writes fiction and lives near Chicago.