Nov 17, 2012 2 min read

Last week, an Arizona woman who was distraught over President Obama’s Nov. 6 election victory and enraged that her husband didn’t cast a ballot, decided to teach him a lesson by stepping on the gas and running him over with their car.

We don’t advise putting spouses in the intensive care unit if they don’t make it to the polls. And we should also point out that if this woman’s husband had, in fact, voted for Mitt Romney in Arizona, it would have been a droplet of gravy for the GOP nominee – he carried the state by a comfy 10-point margin and easily won its 11 electoral votes.

But the vote of the now-convalescing husband would have mattered quite a bit if he had been registered in Pennsylvania’s 39th Legislative District. In both 2010 and this year, Republican Rick Saccone beat Democrat David Levdansky by a little more than 100 votes. And that’s out of more than 20,000 votes cast each time. Levdansky, who served in the Legislature for 28 years before being unseated, must be wondering if there were a few more voters he could have contacted, or a few more doors he could have knocked on, and if that would have been enough to edge him over the finish line.

“Every vote counts” is a civics-class cliche, no question about it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.