What the hell are elections? Part 1

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning boys. How's the water?"

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes: "What the hell is water?"

When I learned that 700,000 absentee ballots were effectively missing almost a month after Minnesota's 2020 election, but that barely anyone knew about this (I didn't learn about it until late in 2021), I set out to learn how this could have happened, and how I had missed it.

Although I didn't exactly think of the problem this way, what I was doing was trying to answer a question... "What the hell are elections?"

Three years later, you're getting an email from me with this parable-ish story about fish and water that sounds like it comes from a commencement speech—it does.

"The point of the fish story is merely that the most important, obvious realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about."

Maybe you're thinking, What elections are is obvious, we have them all the time, and also I just don't have space to think about this right now.

If that's you, I'd ask that you consider the fish who didn't know what water was and for a moment bracket your skepticism about the relevance of actually figuring out what we are doing when we do elections.

And if you're worried that by entering this conversation I'm going to present myself as the wise older fish, please don't be, because I am not the wise older fish.

In fact as I swam through data, county commission, city council, and town board meetings, meetups, conventions, summits, and correspondence with all the kinds of people that are involved in American elections—administrators, advocates, auditors, clerks, the Office of the Secretary of State, political parties, county commissioners, city councils, town boards, and of course, everyday voters—I realized I was one of the two younger fish. I hadn't even really thought about what was right in front of my face.

Not only that. It became apparent that skimming along the surface of things would not allow me to see clearly what elections actually are, what they actually mean for all these people, and for our civilization.

To figure out what the hell elections are, I would not only have to immerse myself, but take a deep breath, dive beneath the waves, and continue down, down, into the unknown waters.

In this series, I'll try to take you along that journey, starting from the beginning, which for me was in 2020 and continues to this day, so that you might see what I saw and reflect on what that means for whatever position you are in now. Maybe, with any luck, the treasure that was discovered at bottom will stir something in you, as it stirred something in me.

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