Thinking About the Importance of Voting

Tuesday November 4 is an important day for all of us. The presidential election and other important governmental elections are upon us.  It is so important for us to voice our positions about the leaders who are running for office and about the policies that those men and women who are elected will enact.  I have often thought that my vote didn’t really matter so why should I get out and vote.  If we all felt that way, no candidate would get elected, or the candidate who did get elected might not necessarily represent the majority of the people. 

I think that voting is so important because, first of all, it is one of our important rights as citizens of this country.  How would we feel if we lived in a country where we didn’t have the right to vote, to elect our leaders, and to voice our opinions about the concerns of our nation, our state, our county, and our city?  There are countries in the world where that is the situation, and I truly believe that the citizens of those countries would change places with most of us in a minute. Another important reason to vote, as I see it, is that voting impacts our future.  A person who is elected to office has an enormous impact on our future and the future of our children.  Some of the laws and policies that are enacted don’t just have an impact on our lives for the years that the elected official is in office.  Often those laws and policies are in place for many, many years.

I got online the other day and an article entitled “The Importance of Voting” caught my attention from the online voting information and resource center of the Pennsylvania Department of State.  I am adding a few lines of that article in closing:

In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln called democracy

“government of the people, by the people and for the people.” It means

that we are not here to serve our government, but that our government

is here to serve us — and we have the right to decide who will

represent us and how we want to be represented. It means that

we have one of the greatest rights any free people can have:

the right to vote. 

Voting is a right that, throughout history, many have fought    

for and sacrificed everything to achieve. It’s a right that people

continue to fight for and that millions of people throughout the

world still do not enjoy. As Americans, we have the great

privilege to live in a free society and voting is the right that

makes us free.