I’ll admit it right now. My name is David and I hate elections. (HI, DAVID!) I hate choosing the evil of two lessers. I hate attack ads. I hate endless repetitive debates that exclude all the interesting questions. I hate painting one candidate as all bad and the other as infallible even when I have to squint to see a difference between them. I hate that there are only two candidates who have a chance at winning. I hate that most of what we hear is through advertisements funded by unbelievably wealthy people, and most of the non-advertising news consists of reports on the advertisements. I hate that election season lasts for a year or more. I hate that after all this, most people don’t vote, not even for third-party candidates or write-ins or none-of-the-above. I hate how people who do vote prefer candidates who promise never to be influenced by public opinion. I hate the “mandate” for fascism that the televisions announce the next day, regardless of what happened. I hate the very premises on which our electoral system rests: corporations are people, money is speech, and computer programmers have never ever cheated on anything.

But I still promote candidates and vote. Why? Because just prior to an election it really should be election season. Because we can still occasionally vote out some incumbents, which is the only way we get a chance of being listened to for the following two years. Because awful as almost all the candidates are, other candidates are even worse. Because subservient as almost all the candidates are to one or the other of the two grotesque parties, one of the parties is even worse than the other. Because following an impeachable blowjob and an unimpeachable aggressive war with an impeachable fictional birthplace would drain all remaining integrity from our Constitutional government — and there are only a few drops left. Because the possibility exists of unseating some of the very worst members of Congress. Because the possibility exists of reelecting and newly electing some of the very best. Because if the Democrats still had a majority in the House and had 60 or more Senate seats, as well as the White House, they’d have to get a lot more creative than “He’ll veto it” or “They’ll filibuster” or “We need the Republicans to like us” when explaining their abject failure to represent the people of this country. And because electing a gang of undereducated bigoted hatemongers would make things even worse.