Here’s something I think about sometimes: for almost the entire history of human civilization, the question “who’s in charge” was settled by whoever had the most swords. Not the most votes. Not the best argument. Swords. The idea that ordinary people — not soldiers, not nobles, not priests — should get to walk into a room, mark a piece of paper, and quietly decide who runs the country is, in the long arc of human history, almost brand new. We’re maybe two and a half centuries into the experiment, and most of the world still doesn’t have it, or has a version of it that doesn’t really work.
The American version is older than most people realize, and younger than most people realize, depending on which part you’re talking about.
When the country started, voting was for white men who owned property. That was it. If you didn’t own land, you didn’t get a say in who ran the place you lived. It took until roughly 1856 for every state to drop the property requirement for white men — meaning a working-class guy in Rhode Island couldn’t legally vote until about a decade before the Civil War. Black men got the constitutional right in 1870, and then most Southern states spent the next ninety years inventing creative ways to take it back: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, intimidation. Women didn’t get the federal vote until 1920. Native Americans weren’t guaranteed citizenship — let alone voting rights — until 1924, and some states blocked them from voting until the 1960s. Chinese immigrants were legally barred from becoming citizens, and therefore from voting, until 1943.
The Voting Rights Act, the law that finally gave the federal government real teeth to stop states from disenfranchising Black voters, was passed in 1965. That’s within my parents’ lifetime. My parents are not ancient. The right to actually cast a ballot, for everyone, in a way that’s enforced — that’s younger than the moon landing.
People died for this. Not metaphorically. Actually died. Marched across bridges and got beaten with clubs. Sat at lunch counters. Got shot in their cars on country highways in Mississippi. There are names you’ve heard — Medgar Evers, the four girls in the Birmingham church — and a much longer list of names you haven’t, because a lot of the people who died for the right to vote were not famous and didn’t get books written about them.
I think about that when I’m standing in line at the rec center every two years, holding my driver’s license, mildly inconvenienced that I had to leave work a little early. I think, somebody died so I could be mildly inconvenienced right now. Somebody crossed a bridge and got their skull cracked open so I could fill out a piece of paper while wearing sweatpants.
So yes. I vote. Always.
I don’t vote because I think my one ballot is going to swing a presidential election. I’m not delusional. I vote because the whole thing — the entire wobbly, imperfect, miraculous machine — only works if regular people keep showing up to feed it. Democracy isn’t a gift somebody gave us once and we get to keep forever. It’s more like a fire. If you stop tending it, it goes out. And the people who came before us tended it through things much harder than parking at a school cafeteria for twenty minutes on a Tuesday.
If you can vote, you should. It’s one of the most quietly extraordinary things a person can do, and almost nobody in human history has gotten to do it.
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