Remember these names: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner.
If you don’t know them, you should. They were the three young men who were brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan (some of whom wore police uniforms when they weren’t wearing hoods) in June 1964 in Mississippi.
They were registering African-Americans to vote.
Tell me again why you don’t find it necessary to vote, when some people in this country believe your voice, and your vote, are so profoundly powerful it’s worth killing (and unfortunately, dying) for.
Closer to home, I’ve told this story before: how my father, a World War II veteran, who was critically injured while in service to his country, was forced to take one of those ridiculous voting eligibility tests when he returned home and tried to register to vote. How ridiculous? Well you tell me, what is the correct answer to the question: “how many bubbles in a bar of soap?”
If voting didn’t matter, there wouldn’t be so much effort to suppress it.
Gerrymandering, redrawing districts so that one political party, even though it is in the minority, will always have the power, is done because voting is important.
Throwing voters off the rolls, playing hide-and-seek with polling places, eliminating voting places, using onerous and arbitrary voter ID laws (a student ID isn’t eligible, but a gun license is) are all done because voting is important.
Keeping people off the voting rolls once they have served their time in prison and paid their debt to society, or changing voter-enacted laws to elicit a poll tax (which is illegal) to keep those newly eligible from voting, would never happen if voting didn’t matter.
I vote in every election, no matter how small. All politics is local. If you want clean streets, good schools, trash picked up regularly, graffiti removed, potholes filled, streetlights maintained, you vote for the people you believe will work to solve those problems and other issues for you.
When I know that many people, from many backgrounds, fought and died for my right to cast a ballot, I realize that it’s not just my civic duty, or even a moral obligation. The blood of my ancestors (and some of yours) was spilled because they believed in the right to participate in the democracy of our country. This means I am bound in a soul-searing way to vote.
Does that sound a little overdramatic?
The families of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner — and countless unnamed others — buried their loved ones, knowing how important voting was, and still is.
Why wouldn’t you vote? Don’t you deserve to be heard?
I vote because my vote and my voice matters — and so does yours.
