This election has definitely been an interesting one to say the least. This was the second time voting for me and it felt nothing like the first. After I mailed in my absentee ballot this time around, I felt like I was part of history. It felt like my vote mattered so much more than my first voting experience. Looking back on it, I have been trying to figure out why that is; why did this election feel so important, not only for me, but for the nation as a whole? There seems as though that there was so much more attention and more of an emphasis on the importance to vote. I am not sure whether or not this was real or just more of an observation because I personally, and the group of people that were around me, paid more attention to this election than the one in 2016.
There seemed to be such a nationwide push to encourage others to vote. I don’t remember ever witnessing anything like this before. It seemed that people on every platform was sending the message to vote. I know that my basketball team participated in a community service event where we mailed letters to individuals letting them know that they were eligible to vote and explaining why voting is important. A lot of people choose not to vote because they do not understand the true process of the election or think that it requires too much, especially with tactics to suppress people from voting.
If there is one thing that I learned from this election, it is that the excuse of “my vote won’t matter” is completely invalid. Watching the results of this election unfold felt like I was watching overtime of game 7 of the NBA Finals. I don’t know if you are a sports fan like I am, but that means that everyone watching was on the edge of their seat. It was such a tight race, especially in the big states that could have turned the election one way or the other. However, the closeness of the race made me believe that every single vote matters. This election seemed like it was a national effort and it feels really nice to see how using your platform to encourage others is so essential and can work.
After the winner was announced, it felt like a weight was lifted off of a lot of people’s shoulders. Beginning this summer, there was worry about how this election would take shape, not just based on who would win, but also how an election in the middle of a pandemic would go. I would say that in comparison to other presidential elections, this one was deviant in the way the voting took place and how ballots were counted. We often think of the word deviant and attach a negative connotation it, but in this case, this whole election can be seen as being deviant because it was not a conventional. Not saying deviant as in there was voter fraud or ballots were counted wrong, but deviant in terms of how many absentee ballots were mailed in and how many days it took to get a projected winner.