In the sixth grade, I had to study for and take a federal and state constitution test.  It was a requirement to graduate elementary school and advance to high school.  Instead of giving the test in eighth grade, as had been customary, the class was moved to the sixth grade to allow students three times to take the test before being held back from high school.

That same year, I  was also in an advanced English class that emphasized reading and vocabulary.  We were given the list of the best one hundred books that potential college students should read in high school.  We were also given a list of approximately one thousand words we should learn before we went to college.  The goal of the class was to read at least ten of the books and to learn the meaning of and how to spell each word during the school year.

My plate was full that year.  However, it was one of the best academic years of my life.  I learned so much about the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution.  The books I read also unlocked the mysteries of human behavior.  I began to better understand the world around me. 

There were several words I learned that overlapped both classes that year.  Two of them were comity and fealty.  According to the dictionary, there are multiple meanings for each word.  However, comity essentially means courtesy and consideration to others, and fealty means intense fidelity or faithfulness.

I define these words here because very few anymore, students or adults, can explain the meanings of these words.  The lack of understanding of these terms is evident in the way that our society and government work today, but not as much as in our elections.

How can clerks allow third parties to have access to the voter rolls for the express purpose of adding voters?  How can dead voters stay on the rolls?  How can ballot boxes be stuffed or votes bought and coerced?  Or worse, ballots printed on the wrong size paper so the machines will not read them?  How can machines not work?  How can our elected officials in places like Maricopa County, Arizona purposely allow this to happen if they understand these two simple words?  How can algorithms add fractional votes or change ballot images?

Greed and power triumph over ideas and tradition.  Wrong prevails over right.  The whims of a few win over the wants of the majority.  While this is nothing new, it has just never been as blatant and pervasive as it is now.

All of the above now happen routinely in our elections.  Worse yet, those in public trust who gave an oath to the Constitution, whom we pay to conduct fair elections, are the ones who consistently fail with our most sacred tasks.  How can voting be stopped and large one-sided ballot dumps occur in the middle of the night?  Why does it take weeks to count all the votes?  The State of Arizona still has not counted all of the votes from its most recent elections!  The list is endless.

I truly wonder if our republic can survive without our society as a whole and especially our elected and appointed officials knowing these two terms.  Unless there is a sudden outbreak of courtesy and consideration to others and faithfulness to the Constitution, we will cease to exist as a republic.  Our elections should be based on the character and ideas of the candidates  instead of being reduced to a scavenger hunt to gather the most votes.  Prescribed rules must be followed, and justice must be applied; otherwise, our republic is doomed to the trash bin of history.

Image via Max Pixel.