I had a little surprise in my mailbox today. I reached inside and pulled out a large white envelope with “ARMED FORCES OR OVERSEAS BALLOT for GENERAL ELECTION 11-4-08″ typed on it. I have to admit, that I got a little excited upon opening it and seeing what all was on it. Besides voting for Democrat or Republican choices, I also have the opportunity to vote for the Green, Libertarian, and Socialist Workers Parties.

I immediately called my friend Emanuele because he’s been waiting for this to arrive to make sure that I don’t screw it up and leave any hanging chads. After that, I called Francesco who by day is a journalist, and by night the ringleader of Atopos. He was real interested in doing a story on this already highly-hyped election.

Who will I be voting for? Well, probably Obama. But if anyone has a lot of earmarked cash, I’d be interested in voting Libertarian.

Here’s some interesting comments from Stanley Hauerwas about the (un)importance of elections in general and his thoughts specifically about this upcoming one:

“People forget that elections are not democracy. Elections are only the
means to try to occasion the debates necessary for the discovery of
goods in common that are impossible to be discovered without the
debates. Elections themselves can be very coercive practices in which
the majority gets to tell the minority what to do. So I think that the
overestimation of elections as the defining mark of democracy, and how
you even begin to think about democracy, is one of the things I would
want to warn Christians about in this time.

I will probably vote this time, but I don’t always do so. I always
think of Mike Baxter’s claim, “Don’t vote, it only encourages them!”
But because Obama is symbolically such an important development, I’ll
probably do what my African American friends tell me to do and vote for
Obama. But I do think that the expectations his election encourage may
become a deep problem, because there’s no way he can meet them.”

Here are three short videos that I thought were very interesting in light of Evangelical Christianity and Politics: