Last Week Tonight host John Oliver may have already reached his biggest goal (that sewage glorious plant renaming in his honor) of 2020, but there was still another important box to check on his schedule. That would be voting for the first time as U.S. citizen after achieving that status last year, after which — as he told Stephen Colbert on Monday night (starting around the 2:00 minute mark above) on The Late Show — he had been “waiting for that to feel real.”
Even following receipt of his passport, he was looking for something to hit him hard, and as it turned out, stepping into the voting booth hit the spot. Imagine being the poll worker to see John Oliver walking in, and then seeing him realize that the time has arrived to make good on all his skewering of the U.S. system’s 2020 ridiculousness:
“Standing in line, I didn’t feel it. Giving my name and getting the ballot, I didn’t feel it. Scanning it into the machine and the machine saying ‘your vote has been counted,’ I nearly burst into tears. That is the truth. My eyes got misty, and I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can cry in a voting station.’”
Early voting was massive this year with nearly 100 million American (which is about two-thirds of 2016’s total voting turnout) getting it done beforehand. Only time will tell (and hopefully, not too much time) who will win the POTUS showdown during one of the most important election cycles of our time. We’ll be gathering here for coverage tonight when the polls close, so please circle back and join us.