OK, I’ll admit that comparing voting to smoking is strange, but give me a minute or two and you might change your mind.
Someone very dear to me started smoking around eighth grade in the girls room at her Catholic grade school. (No, she wasn’t a transgender female who started life as a guy and was setting athletic record upon athletic record. She was always, and still is, an attractive member of the female gender who somehow uncharacteristically decided it was cool to smoke.)
The important point here is: I met this young lady in college and became friends with her. As her friend, I continually lobbied her to quit smoking. She would usually rebuff me by saying something like, “You worry too much; smoking isn’t as harmful as people make it out to be.” Years later, she did quit smoking, however. And when I asked her what motivated her to quit, she replied, “It’s bad for your health, and I didn’t want it to kill me.”
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I asked her why she didn’t acknowledge the health risks years prior to quitting. She said that she knew smoking was bad for her, but she enjoyed it, and didn’t want to give it up. Therefore, she purposely denied the risks. She said that she felt she could always undo whatever damage she had done if she didn’t wait too long. As time went on, however, she began to wonder if it was becoming too late, and therefore, decided she needed to put a stop to her denial and right her ship.
Hopefully, you voted in the April 2 local election. And while you were there, hopefully, you observed how organized and orderly it was. I am guessing you left the building with no question that your vote was properly counted along with the votes of everyone else that day. You might have later noted that the people who received the most votes were declared the winner, and those who garnered fewer votes accepted their loss and acknowledged their defeat. None of the candidates who received a lower number of votes claimed the voting machines had been rigged, or that boxes of votes had been shipped in for their opponent, or that lasers had somehow affected the vote count. No one brought 60 cases to the courts in an attempt to overturn the election results only to lose every one of them.
So, what does all of this have to do with smoking? The answer is “denial.” The smoker knows it is bad for them to smoke, but they refuse to recognize that reality, not because they don’t know it’s true, but because they don’t want it to be true. Consequently, they fabricate various fictions to support their illusion. The same is true of the voter who refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election results that Chris Krebs (director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), Rupert Murdoch (former Fox Corp. chairman), and Bill Barr (former U.S. attorney general) have assured us were accurate.
Just because you want something to be true, doesn’t mean it is. I don’t want to be more than 70 years old, but I am. We all have things in our life that we wish were different, but being a mature adult, we have to deal with them, and go on. Like the people who won in our local elections (including the two referendums that I think will turn out to be a big mistake) we have to put on our big boy jeans, as they say, and face the facts. We can’t climb under the covers in the fetal position and deny reality.
And if we think, like the smoker, that denial isn’t a big deal, we are delusional. For the smoker, denial can lead to an early grave. For the election denier, denial can lead to the loss of our democracy.
I’ve been a local poll worker for more than a decade, but I had missed the last few elections because of a major health issue. This last election marked my return, and I very much enjoyed seeing the many town voters who I had missed. I also enjoyed meeting some new poll workers who I had met during the annual poll training. I’m sure that because of all the publicity regarding possible poll interference, at least some of them signed up to see if there was any truth to rumors of irregularities.
I believe I can say with full confidence that after their time implementing the voting process, they left with no doubt regarding the accuracy of the vote count.
The lesson is: Beware of denial in all of its forms. It can be both seductive and destructive.
Al Rudnitzki is a retired insurance manager, past educator and a Town of West Bend resident.
