One Brick Short

Imagine that you’re out of the country, living on a rock pile or in a sand storm and toting guns everyday on your way to the showers or maybe not getting a shower at all.

Now imagine that you’ve followed all of the rules to get your home town—in this case your home town in Virginia—to send you an absentee ballot so that you can cast your vote for the first-ever African-American to be elected to the Presidency of the United States.

Now imagine that your home town sends the ballot to you way too late for your to get it back to them and get it counted. Now imagine that, since your ballot came in too late because your town sent it to you too late, they don’t bother to count it.

If you vote for a candidate but your vote isn’t counted, have you really voted.

John McCain, the loser in the last election, is going to court today—at least some of his people—to force Virginia election officials to do just that, make every vote count by counting late absentee ballots from U.S. troops serving overseas.

Senator McCain’s presidential campaign claims absentee ballots weren’t mailed on time to military members in foreign countries. A 1986 federal law requires ballots to be mailed to those troops at least 45 days before the election, which this year would have been Sept. 20. The complaint asks the U.S. District Court in Richmond to order the board to count any overseas absentee ballots sent by Nov. 4 and received as late as Friday.

It’s not that Senator McCain thinks the votes will make a difference and put him into office, it’s that everyone’s vote should count.

And he’s right.