Election Day

Election Day was when the world stopped for a moment. You changed whatever your daily routine was and went to your local elementary school or church or community center, and you fulfilled your civic responsibility.

You marked your choices with metal levers, not the pad of your finger, and when you gave a hard pull to open the thick curtain cloaking you, that authoritative grind was the sound of your voice being heard, recorded by solid machinery made in America.

One person, one vote, but all together. You had one day to do it.

That day was the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, set by Congress in 1845, with all due deliberation, after sensible debate, as carefully recorded in the Congressional Record and meticulously archived by the Library of Congress.

But now, everything happens on every day of the week. You can shop on Sunday. You can, in fact, shop online seven days a week, 24 hours a day. You can shop while watching streaming video of a Hollywood release on your telephone, in your bed. You can watch college football on a Tuesday night! There’s virtually nothing we cannot make happen at any hour of any day.

So it was inevitable that Election Day would become a relic of community solidarity. This is the year it’s finally, irrefutably, finished.

Ann Gerhart, www.washingtonpost.com