Greetings, folks. Good morning if you’re in the States, good day if you’re in W. Europe or Africa, good afternoon and evening for points East, and good night Asia.

There are few people, I think, who do not turn their face this morning, day, evening, and night toward America, and the choice we make this day. But it also strikes me that they look here not just to see the direction we will take to our future, but also to witness our process for doing so.

Since my early teens there have been two days that have been true holidays for me: Independence Day and Election Day. For me the democratic process and the principles upon which it rests are deeply important. Today that process and those principles come to life, and as is the case with each electoral cycle, the world will watch not just because our next leader will affect the world, but because the exercise of self determination has brought freedom to millions and brings hope to millions more.

So we are on display today, not just for who we choose, but for who we are. Choose with your conscience, but also choose knowing that, however dimmed by partisanship and troubled times, on Election Day America’s light still shines hope into the darkest corners of the world.

Me … I’ll bathe in that light today, soaking it’s warmth as I cast my own ballot, and as I witness the incredible display of democratic principles taking form not just across America, but across this very page … as citizen journalists around the country make history in reporting this election to the world.

Thank you for reading, and to our contributors, thank you for posting. And finally, to those millions who have sacrificed their most precious treasure to bring us to this point, thank you for your last full measure of devotion.

When I rose this morning and considered the day ahead, these words came to mind:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”