The Last Election

The Twenty-Third Annual Freedom Referendum was seventeen days away, and Devi Kaur was printing ballots in a basement that smelled of toner and institutional despair. She had been a poll worker for four years now, ever since the Sixteenth Referendum abolished private-sector employment and the Bureau of Civic Participation became the only employer left. It was not a bad job. The hours were predictable, the Bureau canteen served reasonable food, and you learned not to think too hard about what you were facilitating.

Each year, the ballot listed one freedom, selected by the Council of Stability through a process that was technically transparent and practically opaque. Citizens voted yes to relinquish it or no to retain it. In twenty-two years, the yes vote had won every single time, because the Council had perfected the art of choosing freedoms people did not realize they used. The right to travel between districts. The right to own more than one hundred books. The right to gather in groups larger than six.

Devi noticed the anomaly on a Tuesday afternoon while running quality checks on the print run. The ballots for this year's referendum were pre-marked. Every single one. A tiny, almost invisible dot in the yes column, printed in ink that would scan as a voter's mark. She checked a hundred ballots, then a thousand. They were all the same. And when she read the freedom listed onthe ballot — the right to participate in future referendums — she understood that this was not a malfunction. It was the endgame.