Heroic voters.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Galicia Malone and Ken Knight - Essay

Two heroes emerged at the polls this year, and neither was named Barack or Mitt. Their names are Galicia and Ken--ordinary Americans with extraordinary depths of civic spirit. While nearly 40 percent of eligible voters didn't bother to cast their ballots this year, these two demonstrated that our democratic right to vote is not something to take lightly--especially at a time when Republican officials in several states had gone to extremes to deny millions of citizens that right.

Galicia Malone, twenty-one years old, was making an urgent trip to the hospital Tuesday morning, because she was about to give birth to her first child. Her water had broken and her contractions were five minutes apart, so there was no time to waste. Contractions be damned, she stopped at her polling place in a Chicago suburb and patiently went down the entire ballot, determined to be counted in her first Presidential election.

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"I was just trying to read and breathe," she says. "This is my first baby, a girl, and I wanted to make a good impression. I want to have a story to tell her." Having proudly delivered her vote, she then drove herself to the hospital and delivered her baby.

Ken Knight of Buda, Texas, died from cancer on Election Day. But, on the previous Friday, the last day of early voting, his wife and several friends lifted him, his wheelchair, and two tanks of oxygen into a van and drove him to city hall. He was "hell-bent on voting," Amy Knight says of her husband. "It was a driving force for him." Her only regret was that she forgot to get an "I voted" sticker for Ken's ride home.

Galicia and Ken and millions of other decent Americans were able to outweigh the billionaire, far-right corporate extremists who tried so hard to become America's Presidential kingmakers this year.

Unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allowing unlimited sums of cash in our elections, they spilled an ocean of money into efforts to enthrone Mitt Romney in the White House and turn the Senate into a GOP rubber stamp for a totally corporatized government.

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On election night, they gathered at exclusive Romney victory parties, but the celebratory mood quickly soured, for...