Editor's Note

Same old story. Same old line: Voting on Election Day is our civic duty. It's why it's a University holiday.

Much of this year's story has already been written for New York and our neighborhood. Charles Rangel will cruise into his 19th term as U.S. representative. Danny O'Donnell will do the same into his third in the state Assembly. Eliot Spitzer will emerge as the victorious gubernatorial candidate, with the Democrats coming closer to tripartite control in Albany.

But despite all the predictable results that will come in, students, professors, and the rest of America know that Election Day 2006 holds special significance. At the national level, Congress is in position to take on a blue hue, a prospect that has led the Columbia University College Democrats to return to Ohio two years after its last visit and the Columbia University College Republicans to cross the Connecticut border to support, well, a pro-war Independent.

This Election Day, Columbia students and Americans from across the country will place their stakes on a gamut of issues: directly on abortion, eminent domain, and same-sex marriage, and indirectly on the war in Iraq.

Though the personalities and battlegrounds haven't changed in this iteration of the story, what's at stake has. What America decides will have an impact for years to come. Same old story, perhaps, but with a very different ending.