I voted in my state, Washington’s, primary election yesterday afternoon. Then I lay around my deck, sunning myself and sipping green tea. Both these things are important. Here are reasons why you should vote.
1.) It’s not hard to google someone or read their statement in the voters’ pamphlet. If they don’t have a statement that tells you something right there…that they’re the only one on the ballot.
2.) Protesting is wonderful. Especially if you have fun signs like “Grab them by the midterms,” but to do that you have to vote.
3.) You have tried to affect the outcome, so you now have the right to complain. Roll your eyes as much as you like.
4.) In federal elections, these are the people that decide if we go to war or not (possibly with nuclear weapons). The proper place for a nuclear winter is in dystopian fiction, not where you live.
5.) Your choices (or lack thereof) can have serious consequences for people other than you.
– Those consequences can be good i.e. in 2012 Washington voted to legalize gay marriage a few years before the Supreme Court did.
– Or they can be bad i.e. closing your state’s lone abortion clinic. Kentucky, West Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota and Mississippi have only one as of January 2018.
Democracy means a government by the people, so vote. Because absentee governing never ends well.
Grad Meets World 