What follws are some reflections on tomorrow's election and the act of voting occasioned by reading many of the posts here as well as on the Mirror of Justice blog.

Some have asked about the character of voting as an act and some have emphasized the privacy of voting. While a vote can certainly mean many things in various contexts and circumstances it would also seem to be an acknowledgment that one participates in some kind of common enterprise. This is why the conscientious decision not to vote is serious: it indicates a kind of exit or suspension of one's participation in or acknowldged membership in the community that comprises the electorate. Voting is private in the sense that one casts a vote out of view--others are legally prohibited from watching one vote. It was not always so. The classical Greek verb that means "to vote" literally means "to raise one's hand." This was done openly in public. In the Laws Plato describes the process by which citizens of his imaginary city, Magnesia, choose their magistrates. Two things are striking: first, the whole process takes place in public view; second, the act of voting is surrounded by religious ceremony. The election itself takes place in a temple and the voters offer prayers as they vote. Secret voting is a relatively recent innovation, part of a whole package of electoral reforms that have their origins in nineteenth-century liberalism. The connection of voting understood as secret and private with liberal political thought and practice has never been better described than by Leo Strauss in his essay, "Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time":

Of course, liberal democracy means limited government, the distinction bewteen the public and the private. Not only must the private sphere be protected by the law, but it must also be understood to be impervious to the law. The laws must protect the sphere in which everyone may act and think as he pleases, in which he may be as arbitrary and prejudiced as he likes. "My home is my castle." But this is not simply true. My home is not simply my castle; it may be entered with a search warrant. The true place of secrecy is not the home but the voting booth. We can say the voting booth is the home of homes, the seat of sovereignty, the seat of secrecy. The sovereign consists of the individuals who are in no way responsible, who can in no way be held responsible: the irresponsible individual. This was not simply the original notion of liberal democracy. The original notion was that this sovereign individual was a conscientious individual, the individual limited and guided by his conscience.

Here the secret vote, discretely executed behind a curtain, is emblematic of the sovereign individual. Such a reform was, in one sense, absolutely necessary. Secrecy was a guarantee that elections could be carried out free from manipulation by any interested parties, especially by the candidates themselves, especially by the officials in power. The modern state offers to its officials powers of intimidation and oppression that dwarf the will to power of ancient tyrants. Secret voting is a necessary and salutary concession to this reality. And it originally preserved a sense of some deeper responsibility connected by Strauss to conscience. Surely that conscience meant at least two things: a will to vote with an eye to the common good and a view of that common good as constituted by the basic principles of morality.

To see one's vote as simply private, and, to use Strauss's term, a characteristic of the "irresponsible individual" is to occlude that sense of the common good, of acknowledged membership in a community whose business voting is. When pressed to the extreme it would seem to entail the obliteration of such a sense. Yves Simon, in Philosophy of Democratic Government (p. 88), describes some conditions under which democratic elections can cease to be efficacious. One is in the wake of some event that inflames popular passions to a point beyond which rational deliberation is unlikely. But another is a situation in which people simply do not see their voting as their participation in a common enterprise, but rather as purely private and individual. Even though everyone is doing the same thing at roughly the same time, the election fails to be a "social act." Perhaps our elections are approaching this. But it seems to me that we haven't simply reached such a stage yet. Nevertheless there are grave threats to the integrity of the political system, which brings me back to the issue of abortion.

Many have evinced frustration that abortion should take up so much of Catholic discussion of the election, as if no other issues matter. The other issues do matter, of course. However, at the same time, abortion is different, and the difference means that it cannot but take up the space it does. Abortion concerns the very definition of the poltical community by defining out of it a huge number of its most vulnerable subjects. I do not say citizens, since the unborn cannot, of course, vote. But they are a class of persons whose very fate hangs in the balance and no one can ignore this. That the fate of any class of persons should simply "hang in the balance" in an election is itself evidence that something gravely disturbing is afoot. The very existence of political life presupposes certain constitutive norms, foremost among which are the protection of innocent life and the representation of all those subject to the community's power. When such norms are cast in uncertainty the very nature of the community is in doubt and normal politics is difficult if not impossible. Such was the case in the United States from the founding until the Civil War and such is the case now. We are not now in a condition of normal politics and cannot be until this matter has been resolved.

Like the earlier grave defect in our politics, this one will not be remedied by elections, legal judgments, nor legislation. There will need to be a profound change of conscience. But such changes must start somewhere. Neither the thirteenth nor the fourteenth amendment nor Brown v. the Board of Education nor the election of 1964 nor the Civil Rights Act of 1965 can be said to have simply effected a change in the nation's conscience with respect to race. But they were all necessary parts of that long and painful process. When, some day in the future, we are able to look upon wide-spread legal abortion as a dreadful memory we will also see particular elections, laws and court cases as parts of the story of its abolition, not the whole story, but parts. And that story will be part of the larger narrative of the moral life of our imperfect community. It's a huge thing and casting one's vote in light of this future narrative, in the hope of ending this awful practice and healing our politics of a grave breech, is a noble and necessary thing.