An encouraging letter from an undecided fellow voter

The text message I sent this morning stunned me. I wrote a message to a friend who had just concluded a meeting with international leaders with diplomatic ties. Those attending the meeting were “deeply concerned that Trump will win,” my friend wrote.

I immediately typed an answer. “I am deeply concerned that Trump will win – and that he will not win.”

Over the past few months, I have read and edited hundreds of news reports about the 2024 election, particularly the contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

And since I expect a ballot to arrive in the mail today, I still can’t decide how to cast my vote.

Who best represents me and the nation? Who protects national security? Religious freedom? Immigration? Is there a threat of war or future pandemics? The economy – and my own wallet?

What about morals, politeness and character?

As a wife and mother of three daughters, I respect the value of having a qualified woman in the Oval Office (just as I respect having a qualified man behind that powerful desk). More importantly, I want a president who will make life easier for the women I love — including my children, who will be graduating college and buying houses in the next four years (if they can afford it).

The competing trade-offs and conflicting benefits of this choice left me dazed.

It appears that thousands on social media have also declared their full support for one candidate or another. But I am one of the many who has been left very confused by this election.

However, there are currently three things in this polarized cycle that give me comfort:

1) The right to vote is an extremely important privilege. After the Civil War, strong citizens of this nation – including great women in the pioneer settlements of Utah – fought and won this right. This privilege is so important that it is ratified in the 15th Amendment, which provides the right to vote regardless of race, and the 19th Amendment, which grants women the right to vote.

I live in Utah – a state that was not considered a swing state in this year’s presidential election – and yet I still feel forced to choose. In a hotly contested race that is too close, our neighbors in Arizona and Nevada could decide the presidency. The decision not to vote for or write to a presidential candidate appears to lack the courage that I expect from you – and every other citizen in this country.

2) We can have great confidence in our electoral system. Following the disputed 2020 election, a group of Republicans (none of whom voted for President Joe Biden), including three former federal appeals judges appointed by Republican presidents, conducted an independent audit of the 2020 election. “There was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the scale necessary to change the outcome in any county, let alone any state or the nation as a whole,” wrote Thomas B. Griffith, a former Federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit who led the effort.

They determined that the 2020 election was not stolen by Biden, but rather won by Biden.

I am deeply convinced that we can also trust the results of the 2024 presidential election.

3) The Constitution is valuable and powerful. Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has argued that the Constitution makes the fear many of us have about this election unnecessary. “We are behaving as if every election now is an absolute all-or-nothing contest for control of the country’s destiny,” he wrote in an email.

“But in fact we have been living with 50:50 politics for a quarter of a century, and that means that in general there is less at stake in our elections than usual, not more, because whoever wins will have narrow majorities and will have a very difficult time There is a lot to achieve that cannot easily be reversed after the next election. There are many disadvantages to our entrenched policy, but one of its advantages is that the stakes are relatively low.”

President Dallin H. Oaks of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said the Constitution provides structure and limits for the exercise of governmental powers. “We are to be governed by law, not individuals, and our loyalty is to the Constitution and its principles and procedures, not to any incumbent,” he taught.

These things don’t make it any easier for me to vote. But the process, President Oaks said, should not be easy. And it could, he added, “require shifting party support or candidate selection, even from election to election.”

But we don’t have to wring our hands in despair – even if our candidate doesn’t win. And if we go to the polls and don’t know who we’re going to vote for, that’s okay too. This nation’s founding fathers not only expected hard-fought and confusing elections, they counted on them.

In the end, we need more than a new president to save America from the challenges it faces. Believers of all faiths across the country agree on this.

So what matters most, no matter how we put it, is our individual right to vote and maintaining trust in the country that people on both sides of the political spectrum truly care about.