Election Day is finally upon us. Of course, something like 99.7 million Americans have already cast their vote prior to Election Day. My wife and I are both among them. I voted in my home district, the remarkably-shaped Illinois 4th, two-and-a-half weeks ago thanks to Chicago’s well-organized early voting system. She voted in her home district, the much more sanely-shaped Minnesota 4th, using vote-by-mail and received confirmation days ago that her vote had been received and would be counted.

Not that either of our votes will matter, in all likelihood. There is no chance that either Biden or Senator Durbin will lose in Illinois, and no chance that Congressman Garcia will lose in the Illinois 4th (a district that has voted at least 76% Democratic in each Presidential election since 2000). Up in Minnesota, Trump’s hopes of flipping the state have faded significantly, and Senator Smith seems to be a safe bet for re-election; as for 10-term Congresswoman McCollum in the Minnesota 4th, she’s won between 57% and 66% of the vote in each election since the district’s boundaries changed in 2013 to extend eastward from St. Paul to the Wisconsin border, and I’d never so much as heard the name of her Republican opponent until I looked it up in the course of writing this post.

Still, the principle of the matter is important – particularly to me, who spent almost two decades of my life living in the U.S. but unable to vote. And it seems the principle is important to an increasing proportion of Americans. 138.8 million votes were cast in 2016, representing turnout of approximately 55%. FiveThirtyEight is predicting that turnout will be somewhere in the 147 to 168 million range in 2020, which would represent turnout in the 57-65% range; we haven’t hit 60% turnout for a Presidential election since the 1960s.

We’ll see what happens. I’m going to try my best to put my head down and ignore politics during the workday, as it’s likely to be a long and chaotic night.

As I’ve been discussing, one of the potentials for chaos relates to the fragmented nature of how Presidential elections are conducted in the U.S., where state and local officials have adopted widely disparate approaches to when and how votes are collected and tabulated. I suspect there may be a push for electoral reform in the wake of 2020.

In that vein, yesterday I noticed a very interesting article in Bloomberg Opinion from a Chicago lawyer (and one-time Democratic congressional primary candidate) named Thomas Geoghegan. He argues that Congress could indeed promulgate uniform federal standards on how all federal elections are conducted, and that such a law would be constitutional under the “privileges and immunities” clause of the 14th Amendment. Interesting thought.