By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com
It’s so nice to see the nation talking positively about Texas, which — to be candid — isn’t usually the case in this modern world.
We usually find ourselves on the front pages when there’s a mass shooting at a church, shopping mall or a school; or when the state’s Republican Party hierarchy doesn’t something stupid.
These days, Texas is the talk of the nation. Why? Because we are setting the early-voting pace that other states are trying to match.
I saw a report tonight that said Texans have cast nearly 86 percent of all the ballots we cast in the 2016 election. We still have two days to go before the end of early voting; plus, we have Election Day balloting.
What does this mean? It could mean that Texas will be among the leaders in voter turnout when we count all the presidential election ballots rather than among the worst-performing states.
This is good news at any level I can imagine.
I said for years when I was writing opinion pieces for newspapers in Amarillo and Beaumont that one of the keys to good government must be vast voter participation. I used to caution residents of both communities about the danger of letting others make key political decisions for them; they might not share your views, I would say.
It looks for all the world that in Texas, as well as in many states, that voters are taking these get-out-the-vote pleas quite seriously.
It fills me with pride to hear the media talk about Texas’s pace-setting early vote totals in tones that suggest that other states should emulate what we are doing here.
