In voting, we, the people of Utah, select political leaders we hope will represent our views and act with honor and integrity. In fact, we might pray for them using words such as pioneer Eliza R. Snow’s: “Let them seek for wisdom instead of power and they will have all the power they have wisdom to exercise.”
Democracy, we believe, provides assurance that the power and trust we invest in elected leaders will not be abused. To that end, George Washington, in his farewell address on Sept. 17, 1796, forewarned, “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.