Still feeling undecided about the election? Join the club

The text I sent this morning stunned me. I was messaging a friend who had just completed a meeting with international leaders that had diplomatic implications. Those in the meeting were “deeply worried that Trump will win,” my friend wrote.
I typed an immediate response. “I am deeply worried that Trump will win — and that he won’t win.”
In recent months I have read — and edited — hundreds of news reports about the 2024 election, especially about the contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
And — as I anticipate a ballot arriving in the mail today — I still can’t decide how to cast my vote.
Who will best represent me and the nation? Who will protect national security? Religious freedom? Immigration? The threat of war or future pandemics? The economy — and my own pocketbook?
What about morals and civility and character?
As a woman and mother of three daughters, I respect the value of putting a qualified woman in the Oval Office (just as I respect putting a qualified man behind that powerful desk). More importantly, I want a president that will make life easier for the women I love — including my children who will be graduating from college and buying homes (if they can afford them) in the next four years.
The competing trade-offs and clashing virtues of this election have left me lightheaded.
It feels that thousands on social media also have declared full-throated support for one candidate or another. But I’m among the many whom this election has left feeling very confused.
There are three things in this polarized cycle right now, however, that give me comfort:
1) The right to vote is a most important privilege. Following the Civil War, strong citizens of this nation — including amazing women in the pioneer settlements of Utah — fought and won that right. That privilege is so important it is ratified in 15th Amendment, which offers voting rights regardless of race, and the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.
I live in Utah — a state not considered a swing state in this year’s presidential election — yet I still feel compelled to choose. In a tightly contested race that is too close to call, our neighbors in Arizona and Nevada could decide the presidency. Choosing not to vote or writing in a presidential candidate seems to lack the courage I am expecting of them — and every other citizen in this country.
2) We can have great confidence in our election system. After the contested 2020 election, a group of Republicans (none of whom voted for President Joe Biden), including three former federal appeals court judges who had been appointed by Republican presidents, conducted an independent examination of the 2020 election. “There was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any precinct, 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.
The 2020 election was not stolen by Biden, it was won by Biden, they found.
I have deep confidence that we can also trust the results of the 2024 presidential election.
3) The Constitution is precious and powerful. Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has argued that the Constitution makes the angst many of us feel about this election unnecessary. “We behave as though every election is now an absolute all-or-nothing contest for control of the fate of the country,” he wrote in an email.
“But in fact, we have been living with a 50-50 politics for a quarter century, and that means that the stakes of our elections are generally lower than usual, not higher, because whoever wins will have narrow majorities and find it very hard to get much done that can’t be readily undone after the next election. There are many downsides to our deadlocked politics, but one of its upsides is that the stakes are relatively modest.”
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 government powers. “We are to be governed by law and not by individuals, and our loyalty is to the Constitution and its principles and processes, not to any office holder,” he taught.
These things do not make voting any easier for me. But the process, said President Oaks, was not intended to be easy. And it may, he added, “require changing party support or candidate choices, even from election to election.”
But we don’t need to wring our hands in despair — even if our candidate does not win. And if we go to the election box not knowing who we will vote for, that’s OK too. The founders of this nation not only anticipated deeply contested and confusing elections, they also counted on them.
In the end, we’re going to need more than a new president to save America from the challenges it faces. That’s something believers of all kinds across the country can agree upon.
What matters most, then — regardless of how we cast it — is our individual right to vote, and not losing confidence in the country that people on both sides of the political spectrum really do care about.