If you’re heading to the polls today in Kentucky, Indiana or South Carolina and you’d like to stop on the way home for a bracer to 
help ease the anxiety of waiting for the results of the Presidential election, you are out of luck. Those of us living in more enlightened states empathize with your plight, but according to the Distilled Spirits Council, you cannot buy a drink today in Kentucky, Indiana or South Carolina, which are still stuck in the Prohibition era–even though Prohibition was repealed 75 years ago.
Wine-drinking residents of Utah, West Virginia fare a little better, since their archaic state laws only ban the sales of alcohol at package stores on Election Day. And in a true expression of states rights, Alaska and Massachusetts also ban Election Day sales of alcohol, although they allow local governments an exception to that ban.
This uniquely American form of prohibition is known as a “Blue 
Law,” a restriction I vividly remember from growing up in Pennsylvania in the 1940s and early 1950s, when the only place to buy alcohol in any form was a State Store. One year, before Christmas, our neighbor was going to the State Store and asked my mother if she wanted any holiday cheer. In those days, Pennsylvania State Stores were painted blue and gold, the state colors, with a door in the middle of the façade and two empty display windows on either side of the door. Inside was a long, empty display case-counter and a cash register in the middle, standing in front of a curtained doorway to the back area, with empty shelves on either side.
The clerk, who did no selling or promotion, presented a loose-leaf binder to our neighbor who paged through until she found what 
she wanted and pointed to the picture. The clerk closed the binder, placed it under the counter, retired to the backroom, and returned with a bottle in a brown bag which was placed out of sight under the counter. The price was rung up, our neighbor handed over her money, the clerk reached under the counter and brought up the brown bag, which was handed to our neighbor. We then walked out the door. No sales, no marketing, no promotion.
I haven’t been to a Pennsylvania State Store in years, but I understand that the Keystone State has eased up a little on the 
sales of alcohol. However, it appears that a heavy-handed display of ridiculous government control of alcohol sales is still alive and well in the seven states mentioned above. So if you are a resident of one of these states, do yourself and your fellow wine drinkers a favor; when you get home from the polling place, write your Congressman and tell him or her that you want these archaic state laws regarding the sales of alcohol on Election Day repealed now.
6