Imagine the man.

He’s young by today’s standards, a young wife at home, perhaps children. Perhaps like me he has daughters. He roots for his team in baseball, or perhaps before there was baseball another sport His Sundays are taken up with church and family, sitting across a pew with his young family. He works hard, he lives as well as he can, he is American.

Imagine the man answering the call of his nation. No matter it was World War I or II, the Civil War, the war of 1812, the Revolution itself or any of the others. He answers to protect the great experiment in Democracy, the idea that a people should control their government.

He gives the ultimate measure, his life.

As he lays there in the dirt or the mud, or waiting for the ocean to take him, he knows that he will never feel his wife’s touch again, nor hold his children or watch them as they sleep safely in their beds. He will never kiss a scratched knee or mend a broken doll. He will not see his children grow. Any small moment of human comfort is lost to him as the blood flows from his body and he gives his last breath thinking of those he left behind.

His wife stands as the government men approach, she knows. The children will cry for their father again and again until they are old enough to understand.

Not one man alone, but millions have paid this price for our right to vote.

Diebold, Sequoia, Advanced Voting Solutions and others may have stolen this precious gift from us. The right to vote: the most central of all American values, paid for in the blood of heroes and stolen by comfortable people in suits in exchange for money and influence. Diebold President Walden O’Dell promised to help deliver Ohio’s electoral votes. Filmmakers(HBO) have documented tampering. The list of suspicions grow.

If there are those who are trying to take away our right to determine our own destiny through the vote, do they deserve less than the despots of the past?