View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

People sometimes ask me how I come up with topics to write about. I would say they just come, out of the blue sky. I thought that today I would write about advent, about the light that came into the world and overtook the darkness. But instead I was inspired by Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock who said that to vote was kind of like a prayer for the future. Which lead me to think about democracy in general.

Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address, which was given after the bloody battle of Gettysburg, November 19th 1863, in the middle of the Civil War: “  …that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

I was reminded by Senator Warnock’s statement and by Lincoln’s words how important democracy is and how it rests on fair and free elections. And how close we were to civil war a mere two years ago.

The opposite of democracy is dictatorship. And the opposite of freedom is tyranny which happens in a dictatorship. It is hard for us who live in a democracy not to take it for granted. It is easy for us to just be tired of politics and all the mudslinging. It seems to me that we just listen to the views on media that we agree with and therefore a big schism has formed in our beloved democracy. But I also think that, despite the January 6th insurrection, most people in our beloved nation believe in democracy and do not want a dictatorship with arbitrary rules and fear.

As you might know, I grew up in the shadow of such a dictatorship. My parents and grandparents risked their lives to fight the tyranny that ruled Norway for five long years.

It is also important to remember that Hitler came to power in an election where most people chose not to vote. And that it didn’t take him long to abolish democracy and arrest all the politicians in the Reichtag who had opposed him. What then followed was a 12 year reign of terror that spared no one as Hitler descended into madness at the end and forced boys as young as 12 and old men to fight the losing battles of World War II.

Norway’s constitution, signed in 1814, is the second oldest in the world still in existence. But the oldest is the U.S. constitution which was signed on July 4th, 1776. These constitutions both set up democracies, meaning the people, not a tyrant, govern themselves.

We can always be dissatisfied with the outcome of elections. But there is a simple cure for that and it is called voting. I am so grateful that, in the midst of mudslinging and long debates, but especially in the midst of violence and hateful and threatening mail committed upon politicians and even mere election judges, people are still willing to serve.

My husband, Grant, works as clerk for Benson Township, and therefore he is in charge of finding election judges. I have even been trained to work as an election judge. At home, we talk about how accurate our elections are. The election machines are not online so they can’t be hacked. Each voter fills out a paper ballot which is then put into the machine. To get the ballot, the voter has to sign by his/her name on a list of registered voters and thus can get only one ballot. If you are not registered, you have to have an ID and proof of where you live (which can be an electric bill for instance). One election judge will hand out ballots, another will stand by the machine. The machine counts the ballots, but since they are paper ballots, they can also be counted by hand.

Free and fair elections mean we have the right to have different opinions. We never need to live in fear of the police coming in the middle of the night to arrest us because of our political beliefs. When I became a U.S. citizen, I was able to vote here for the first time. It would have been easy for me to say that was a privilege, which it was, but voting was and is and hopefully always will be, a right. In Warnock’s words: “A prayer for the future world we desire.”