The Marauders: Year Five #Wattys2017

A Vote for Voldemort

A Vote for Voldemort

To the members of the Order of the Phoenix,
I hope your summers are all going well and the propaganda posters Sirius and I sent you last week found their ways into all the magical places you visit and maybe even got a few people thinking about their votes.
I am sure by now the lot of you have heard about the Minister, Eugenia Jenkins, and the murder at the Ministry for Magic. Having no Minister at all leaves the Wizarding World really vulnerable, and the Daily Prophet said that means the elections are going to be even more important come 4 August because there's an awful lot that's going to go on now that the major authority is Alastor Moody, as the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. With Moody acting Minister and Harold Minchum a biased party, the Department's head person is Bartemius Crouch, which my dad says he's an alright bloke, if not over-strict.
Bartemius Crouch will be judging the Druella Black case this Monday at the Ministry and there are loads of witches and wizards who have been affected by her awful deeds so the Ministry's going to be packed full of people waiting to see the sentencing delivered.
Sirius and I were thinking that would be a good time to go to the Ministry with our posters and tell people what a great bloke Minchum is and try to raise his numbers at the poll. Right now, Adom Tutman is winning and we absolutely cannot have Tutman in office because having Tutman might as well be electing Voldemort himself!
So basically if you want to come out, we'll be going off down to the Ministry sometime around lunch on Monday and meeting at the gold fountain in the sanctuary. Bring any posters you have left and we'll bring loads, too, and any buttons you might have with the Minchum for Minister message on them!
See you then...
J.P.

Lily Evans laid across her bed, her suitcase on the floor, but empty.

"Lily! Petunia!" Mr. Evans yelled up the stairs, "Are you girls nearly ready? I'm just waiting on your suitcases for the car!"

Lily felt sick. She rolled up the letter from Potter and sat up, taking her wand up from the pillow beside her and waved it so that her clothes folded themselves into her suitcase and a couple of her textbooks and a pair of pretty sandals went in, too, as she tied her trainers and ran a brush through her messy ginger hair. She could hear Petunia in the hall, struggling with her suitcases. Lily got up as her things continued on packing themselves and looked at Petunia, lugging two very large suitcases down the hall. "Want some help?" Lily asked, holding up her wand.

"No," Petunia snapped and she made a face at the sight of Lily's things flying about the room behind her. "Freak," she added haughtily, and she went on dragging her things down the hall.

"Fine. Drag them all the way down the stairs, then," Lily shrugged and slammed the door behind her, turning back as a bottle of sunscreen and her Gryffindor sweater went into the suitcase and it shut, zipped and stood upright on its own, ready for her to take it downstairs to her father. "There."

She took up the letter from James again, looking at the way he'd scrawled the J.P. at the bottom.

When she had received the letter, it had been Saturday afternoon and the Evanses had been sitting together in the living room watching the news. There was nothing on the muggle news about the election race between Minchum and Tutman, nothing about the rise of Lord Voldemort or the murder of the Minister Eugenia Jenkins. In fact, James's letter had been the first Lily had heard about the murder. She'd stared at the letter in stunned silence, her heart racing in fear, for several long moments.

"Is everything alright, dear?" Mrs. Evans had asked and Lily, not wanting to expalin who Voldemort was and why he would kill the Minister for Magic, had said that everything was brilliant.