Thank you, Father Ephraim, and thank you to everyone here who fills this gym tonight,

very safely, physically distance.

It's good to see you all.

I'm certainly grateful to the Temistic Institute and to St. Charles' community here for the invitation.

It's a pleasure to be with you all.

We gather tonight just two weeks away from our nation's presidential election, and so politics,

and the presidency and governance and the American experiment and voting in particular,

these are realities that if we would like to ignore them for

a bit, we simply can't.

I mean, the culture at the moment in terms of news, but also at work and schools everywhere.

The public square is saturated with the question of the election. And as I guess should take place every few years when we do have an election, the question of voting comes up.

And the encouragement for the populace to vote.

We're all encouraged to vote.

Both sides of the political aisle have their own programs, right, to get out the vote,

to encourage people to get involved, to show up on election day and vote.

It's interesting this election cycle.

I don't remember voting itself being front and center as it is now,

because we have as part of the debate regarding the election

and the presidency debates about voting itself and how it should be done early on the day of

absentee by mail in person the ways of voting just proliferated this year, in large part due to COVID.

But I think if you look back at previous election cycles or just at the series of the last several election cycles,

there's been a movement to expand the opportunity for the citizenry to vote again as a way of

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