Election Day

Richard “Ricky” Ramos was young, energetic, charismatic, and while he only had a few years of civil service under his belt, he was one of the billions sent to fight the Covenant, and now he and I were neck and neck in the polls and the elections. Despite being from Earth – San Francisco, California to be specific – he had a significant sway across the entire Solar System, and had surprisingly strong polls beyond it. His eyepatch further signaled his sacrifice on the front for all of humanity, which only served to draw more voters to him. As Election Day drew near, I was mentally preparing myself to refer to him as “President-elect Ramos.” His smile on the TV monitor with a purple bar steadily increasing beneath his portrait, with a thin moustache and goatee, oozed self-confidence.
Yohannes Hailemariam, a long-time civil servant in the CAA, was a very close third-place contender. However, he didn’t have much name recognition besides Ramos and myself, and he wasn’t very electrifying at his rallies. Nevertheless, his constant touting of his experience in administration as well as his origins – he was born and raised on Eridanus II to a family of farmers originally from a no-name village in the Ethiopian Highlands – meant that he appealed to many outside the Solar System, an important voting bloc. His portrait was of a kindly, somewhat portly, old Black man with his African-textured graying hair and blocky square spectacles. I admit I had a slight feeling of pity when he was eliminated in the first round of voting, albeit by only around a million votes.
There was also more fringe candidates who surprisingly nabbed several million votes on a few planets. One of the most prominent ones was Gertrude Winkleman. A wealthy tech magnate from Reach, she ran on a platform mainly consisting of rabid anti-alien xenophobia, a position I honestly understand: Winkleman lived on Reach her whole life, and her family resided there ever since major terraforming wrapped up in the late 2300s. Even if you don’t count that in, she lost her nephew, a Marine, in combat against the Covenant on Arcadia. The amount of votes she got was quite frankly troubling to me, although her portrait on the television showed none of this: she looked like a middle-aged housewife, with a beaming smile and flowing, blonde hair. Thankfully, she was eliminated in the first round.
Another fringe candidate was Suleiman “Sully” Hadid, from the Indonesian community on Mars. A neo-Koslovic in all but name, Hadid espoused far-left thinking and policies in his speeches, which roused the often economically-bereft crowds that flocked to his rallies. Unfortunately, his outgoing down-to-earth personality was outmatched only by his gaffes, from asking for a child to kiss him on the lips to saying how all the Jews murdered at Auschwitz would’ve voted for him when he visited there at this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ultimately, he didn’t make it past the first round.
There were rumors that Margaret Parangosky, the infamous C-in-C of ONI, would run as a candidate of the United Humanity Party in the elections, but she (at least publicly) declined to involve herself in what she stated were “petty politics.” Lord Hood and the “hero of New Moravia,” Captain Maksim Nestorenko, also both declined to run as candidates in the election, stating that they were “soldiers, not politicians.” Honestly, I somewhat envy their positions. Even Parangosky’s. Especially Parangosky’s.
And then there was me. Dr. Ruth Charet. Born and raised in New York City, the middle child in an upper middle-class family of academics. I had some combat experience as a Marine fighting against Innies, but that was a lifetime ago, and now I was a sixty-something-year-old great aunt who had a PhD in sociology and worked as the primary liaison between the UEG and the CAA, which undoubtedly brought me name and brand recognition, along with valuable experience. But Ramos was honestly worrying me. The polls had me in a very narrow lead, and to be quite frank, even as the polls across the worlds of UEG-controlled space were synchronized to close at precisely the same time (at least, relative to their own time zones: a poll closing at 2000 hours on one planet would have another at a corresponding latitude close at that time as well), I had the nagging thought that Ramos’s underperformance would rebound and mirror the glowing opinion polls he received at the height of campaigning.
I had Ramos beat out on experience in the bureaucracy and politics. He was a relative greenhorn, while I had decades under my belt. But other than that, Ramos seemingly had the advantage. Technically he served longer than me, and arguably fought harder than me. At least I didn’t deal with aliens. He was younger, spry, and leveraged his naturally magnetic personality to his advantage, wooing crowds of thousands every time he showed up at a rally. I had to rely on my message: hope. I preached a message of hope, of rebuilding a badly battered human civilization, of reuniting humanity under the auspices of freedom, democracy, peace, and post-war economic miracles. Originally I was in the bottom rung of candidates, since my peace message was basically tone deaf during the war. However, with the Covenant gone, I gained a lot of breathing room, and my message got more and more airtime and attention, to the point where the race between Ramos and Yohannes turned into a three-way race, and then, me passing Yohannes. However, my fears that Ramos’s message of vigorous rebuilding with an aggressive foreign policy would resound more in people’s hearts than mine were looming large.
Then, the polls closed. I waited behind the stage in the convention center our party rented out for this final event, where I would then walk out onto the stage when the news outlets called it, a walk of either towering triumph, or graceful defeat. My husband Jean-Marc, my brother William, his wife Dorothy, and their children, Hank and Theo, and Hank’s wife Emma and little girl Gabby, were all at my side as we watched Earth News Network. The network’s head reporter Eric Fletcher, whom little Gabby humorously called “Santa” – he was about my age and had a large white beard and short hair, a look further juxtaposed with his gray three-piece checkered suit – stood by a holographic projection of the graph of vote Ramos and I had. He was conversing with other political reporters when the news came in.
“Alright everyone, standby, just coming in to ENN,” said Fletcher with a commanding, authoritative voice. “ENN can now confirm: Dr. Ruth Charet received more than 51%, more than the 51% of the votes needed to send her to the presidency. I say again: Dr. Ruth Charet has won - won enough votes to become President of the Unified Earth Government, with her opponent, Ricky Ramos, trailing her by only ten million votes.”
“Yay, Great Aunt Ruth won!” elated cheered Gabby. I yelped in ecstatic surprise as Theo screamed out with a “Woo!” Jean-Marc, who sat right beside me, gripped my hand tenderly. We looked into each other’s eyes, and gave the biggest smiles to one another before we embraced.
“Congrats, Ruth!” said William. I laughed in shock and jubilation, covering my mouth with my free hand.
“We should meet the crowd out there,” said Jean-Marc.
“Of course, of course, just give me a few moments to catch myself,” I replied.
I sat there for what seemed to be a hundred years, just taking it all in. I won. I won a presidential election. The presidential election! I didn’t even write a victory speech, just a concession one, so I thought about what I had to ad-lib for my moment on stage as a president-elect, although my heart jumping in my chest, out of it, and dancing in the punch bowl at the refreshments stand was quite a distraction. If I was standing, I’d have fallen to my knees, or into the nearest chair.
Then, finally, I roused myself onto my feet and walked out onto the carpet, the spotlights trained on me, with thousands of screaming, overjoyed supporters, many of them waving “CHARET” or “THE DOCTOR FOR PRESIDENT” or “HOPE” (my favorite one) signs. The screaming was largely incoherent, but quickly formed into a chant, first coming from the middle, then swiftly radiating out, and that chant was my name. “Cha-ret! Cha-ret! Cha-ret!” It felt like getting swept up by a thousand angels all blasting heavenly trumpets and carrying me off to Paradise. It certainly did feel like that, my goodness it did! I smiled wider than a five-year-old coming home from Halloween with a plastic pumpkin basket full of candy, with my right hand holding Jean-Marc’s left, and my left hand holding Gabby’s right. We all came out from the left side of the stage, and walked down a sort of causeway leading to a podium with a microphone. From the right, there was a causeway mirroring ours, and from the curtains emerged my running mate for vice president, Jin Jié, a forty-year-old activist originally from Mu but currently residing in Hong Kong. He originally ran as one of my opponents in my party’s primary, but I felt like he had a certain magic I just couldn’t replicate, so I asked Jin if he wanted to be my VP, and he agreed. And now here we were.
Jin stood to my left, while Jean-Marc was to my right as I stepped forward to the podium, grasping the sides gently. The crowd was still chanting my name when I said “Well, everyone, I’m very proud and honored and humbled to say that HOPE WON!” Everyone went into an elated uproar. I certainly heard a vuvuzela blaring in the back of the room, and I think I heard car horns honking outside the convention center. “Hope won, and I’m glad that all of you proved that democracy still works after all these years! I’m just so very glad that the people chose hope over despair, peace over war, life over death, and prosperity over poverty. We can start to rebuild our shattered species, with the power of hope! For as long as we have hope, we will not only survive, we will thrive!” More cheers followed. I waited for them to die down to continue. “And hope is the one thing that will get us through these tough times! With hope, we can reclaim worlds lost, unify our divided species, and bring humanity into a new age! A better age! One brighter than before! All we have to do is take that first step, and here today we have!” A furious uproar overcame the whole hall.
In this moment, no doubt Ramos was watching my victory speech, ad libbed, and with me not reading a single line from a prompter or note. And no doubt he was waiting for me to step off the stage to call me on my phone and offer congratulations. Or maybe in fact he was not, and was instead making his concession speech in front of a crowd of deflated supporters. Either way, he and I would certainly share words later on. That also reminded me of future conversations with Lord Hood, conversation I very much looked forward to. I certainly felt like with the Covenant crumbling into dust, it was high time for the UNSC to transfer its overarching authority and administration back to the UEG, to the civilian government. And I was most certainly looking forward to reigning in ONI. I’ve felt like they were watching me ever since I became a Marine.
I hardly slept that night, I was so giddy. Gradually, though, over the following days, the reality and magnitude of my responsibilities sunk in, and they did so quickly. My joy was tempered by reality, by facts. My enthusiasm turned to determination. My peaching of hope and peace and prosperity turned into action. Or at the very least, planning courses of action. But make no mistake, please don’t: when the networks called it, I could do hardly little than leap for joy.
Category:The Weekly