No matter what political party you affiliate with or whether you are voting for a Republican, Democratic, or Third-Party candidate on Election day, one thing we can all agree on is how stressed the importance of this year’s election was. Since the candidates first started campaigning almost eighteen months ago, it is all anybody ever talks about. The presidential race is being brought up on virtually every platform there is; from newspapers, to magazines, to the Internet, to TV shows, to even here on campus. For two months straight, I, like everyone else, was asked about five times a day if I was registered to vote. Everywhere we look, we are constantly being bombarded with information about the election of 2016. Even more so, now that the election is only 21 days away. There are commercials and ads on around the clock reminding us to register to vote and head out to the polls on Election Day. The election has become so prominent in our society that when the topic of voting and its significance were first mentioned in the novel The Circle I was not surprised at all.

The mention of voting comes at a critical point within the story where many changes are occurring in the characters, specifically Mae. By this point, Mae is almost completely under the Circle’s control. She has been slowly transforming into being like the rest of her Circle coworkers by abiding to many of the company’s rules and regulations. For example, she is much more involved with documenting her life on social media than she was at the beginning of the story. So much so, that she has begun wearing a camera pendant to record all of her actions to show to the public. The clarity and sense of betterment she feels about herself after making these changes encourages her to begin proposing ideas to further enhance the outside world with the Circle’s presence. Some of Mae’s ideas include full transparency for every person on the planet by requiring everybody to have a Circle account and making Circle accounts have a role in monetary transactions, along with other personal information such as credit cards to provide for easy, accountable payment methods, minimizing fraud. Mae also pursued this direction of transparency and full access in her proposal that national voting be done through an app – later called Demoxie. The voting app suggested that everybody could be held accountable to vote since it already played such a huge role in everyday life.

This line of pursuit Mae is proposing to make everything, including the ability to vote, revolve around having a Circle account becomes known as “closing the Circle” in the novel. Although this idea of “closing the Circle” had already been a simmering prospect among the Circlers, the strive to make the Circle an all-encapsulating method for practically all elements of society is heightened with Mae’s endorsement. With this, the Circle is able to allow for more elaborate, regulative movements on what is going on in the outside world through data collection. To Mae, her actions seem to be making huge steps towards the future, while, in reality, her ideas are only carrying out the societal changes that The Circle’s monopolization depends on.