Brazil Votes: The Augmentation Question Goes to the People at Last

BRASÍLIA — The polls open across four time zones this morning, and for the first time in months the argument will be settled by something other than argument. Brazil votes today on the question its campaign refused to be about anything else: whether the state should cap human augmentation and school the enhanced apart from the natural-born, or whether that line, once drawn, becomes a wound the country cannot close. The Naturalist bloc rode a quarter of the electorate to the threshold of real power on the promise of the caps; the governing coalition spent its final week not defending augmentation but defending the ordinary, mixed, un-sortable household — the family with an enhanced husband and a doubtful mother, the classroom where the line would have to run straight through the third row. Turnout by mid-morning was heavy in both the enhanced districts and the Naturalist heartlands, each side certain the day belongs to it. "I am not voting for a side," said a poll worker in Brasília, watching the queue thicken. "I am voting to still have a country on Monday that both my sons can live in." By tonight the country will know what it decided. It does not yet know what it will cost.