My wife has a very cute superstition about voting.

[NNadir]

2. That used to be the case here as well, but it changed. We were discussing it this morning. In the 2000 election...

...I had to get an absentee ballot, because I was going to be in Italy on election day. Without an absentee ballot, one had to vote in the township building; there was no other option.

Besides the Bush/Gore fiasco, in my town, we had two other very close elections. One involved the best Congressperson I ever had in my long life, Rush Holt, a physicist and a wonderful thoughtful liberal (with whom I sometimes disagreed but always enormously respected) and also the mayor of our township, an election that literally involved a difference of one vote. (They actually decided to have a second election; the local Democrat won the second time out.)

When I called my wife from Italy, she told me Rush Holt had lost, and I was devastated. However, the election was so close, a few hundred votes, that Holt did not concede because the absentee ballots, including mine, had not been counted,

When they were counted, Holt won.

I never felt that my vote mattered as much as it did then. My chest swelled a bit. Holt went on to serve multiple times until he decided to retire to head the AAAS.