We Vote Anyway

Pennsylvania soldiers voting in camp with the Army of the James, 1864 — sketched by William Waud for Harper's Weekly. Public domain, Library of Congress.

Part 2 of Election Day — a short series for the week of the vote: where elections came from, what the record says about us, and the neighbors who run ours.

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Here's a question worth sitting with the week before an election: has this country ever postponed one?

Not a primary in one county. Not a city election after a hurricane. The national election — the big one, the one the whole government hangs on. Has war, or plague, or disaster ever made America say, "Not this year. We'll vote when things calm down"?

The answer is no. Not once. Not in more than 180 years of keeping the same date.

And it isn't because nobody ever thought of it.

In the summer of 1864, the Civil War was grinding through its fourth year, and Abraham Lincoln was sure he was going to lose. His own party knew it. Some Republicans suggested what must have sounded reasonable: put the election off until the war was settled. Lincoln refused — and then did something that tells you everything about the man. He wrote a memo to his Cabinet, sealed it, and had them sign the back without reading it. It said that if he lost, as he expected, they would spend the months before the inauguration doing everything possible to save the Union, because his opponent would take office on ground that made saving it impossible.

He planned for his own defeat. He would not plan around the election.

That fall, with the war still raging, the country voted. States scrambled to let soldiers cast ballots from the field — the first widespread absentee voting in our history — because the men doing the fighting were not going to be denied their say in what they were fighting for. Lincoln won. Two days later, standing in front of a crowd at the White House, he said the thing this whole piece is about:

"We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

Read that again. Postponing the election wouldn't have been a delay. It would have been the defeat itself.

And 1864 wasn't a one-time act of stubbornness. It set the pattern the country has followed ever since. In 1918, Americans voted in the middle of a world war and a flu pandemic that was killing people in every state — they voted wearing masks. In 1944, they voted in the middle of the Second World War. Hawaii voted in 1942 while living under martial law. When Hurricane Sandy tore up the East Coast a week before the 2012 election, nobody moved Election Day — states set up tents and emergency ballots and voted anyway. In 2020, in a pandemic, with people arguing about almost everything, the election happened on the day it was supposed to happen.

Now, hold both truths, because there's another one. We are not the only democracy that faced this choice — we're just one of the few that answered it this way.

Britain postponed. In both world wars, Parliament extended its own life rather than face the voters: the Parliament elected in 1935 sat for nearly ten years, until the summer of 1945. Canada put its election off during the First World War. New Zealand did the same in the Second. Those aren't failed countries. They're serious democracies that looked at the same crisis and made a different, defensible call: stability first, vote when it's over.

Australia stands with us. In both world wars, postponing was proposed — and refused. They voted in 1917, and again in 1943 with the war closing in on their own shores. Switzerland has voted on schedule for just as long, though its streak was never tested by invasion.

So no, we're not the only ones. But look at the company, and look at the test. The countries that postponed were not wrong, exactly. They just treated the election as something a nation does when conditions allow. America, at its best, has treated it as something a nation does because it must — the proof, offered on schedule, that the government still belongs to the people, especially when everything else is on fire.

I think that's what the record really shows: how much, as a nation, we honor and respect our elections. Not in speeches. In behavior. In tents after hurricanes and masks during a plague and ballots mailed home from a battlefield. We have never once decided that the circumstances were too hard for the people to have their say.

The election isn't a fair-weather ritual. Holding it on time is the statement.

Tomorrow, when you walk into that school cafeteria or library or church hall, you're taking part in something that a civil war couldn't stop. Vote like it matters — because for over 180 years, Americans in far worse circumstances than ours have insisted that it does.