Former Congresswoman Barbara Comstock told students and faculty at the University of Virginia that she intends to work at the polls on Election Day and wishes those who doubt our system would do the same.
“I am, for the first time in my life, a single issue voter," she said. "I was a conservative Republican, but now my issue is democracy. I have found that these people who come with the conspiracy theories – they have usually not worked at the polls.”
If they understood history and politics, she says, people would be less likely to believe that our elections are not legit.
“On Election Night of 2020, they started saying, ‘Oh look, they’re stealing the votes in Fairfax County! Nobody is stealing anything. Donald Trump got 29% in Fairfax County in 2016.”
Media Studies Professor Siva Vaidyanathan agreed, recalling his own experience as an election volunteer.
“I loved smiling at people as they came in. I loved making them feel proud to make this statement and to say: Yeah, I’m part of something bigger,'" he recalls. "We should all get chills when we vote. We should actually take a moment and realize what that act means – what people have sacrificed to give you the ability to do that, what signal you’re sending to your fellow citizens.”
And he worried that countries like Brazil, the Philippines and India had turned away from democracy – electing strongmen – after the United States put Donald Trump in office.
“And I fear that when we take these things for granted we send messages to the rest of the world: It’s okay to take it for granted as well. Because Americans don’t care about democracy anymore, why should we?”
Speaking in the Rotunda, designed by Thomas Jefferson, Vaidhyanathan worried aloud about the possibility of violence following November’s election.
“We’re in this temple of democracy, but we’re also overlooking the lawn where Nazis marched in 2017. Their footprints are still out there. The smell is still in the air. It could happen at any moment, anywhere in the country.”
And Comstock fears the public no longer cares about character – that we will elect more scoundrels to Congress, but she also expressed hope for justice and some kind of recovery for the nation.
“Steve Bannon will be sentenced, and he’ll be going to jail, and post-election I believe Donald Trump will be indicted," she predicts. "I think that is important for the system + and I think it will happen without a lot of tumult. When everybody on Fox had a meltdown in August and they said, ‘They went in and they took his documents,” Fox News basically tried to start a riot over that, and people were on vacation and said, ‘Nope, I’m going back to the beach and have my cocktails, and I’m really not that upset about it.'"
And looking ahead to 2024 they saw one other cause for concern – the possibility that several states will choose election officials who think Joe Biden’s supporters stole the presidency. Those officials could change the outcome of the next presidential vote so it does not represent the will of the people.
