Never Give Up Your Rights — Vote!
Vote even if you think that elections will not bring any change!
Imagine. You are at the restaurant. You don’t know what to order. So, you decide to allow a stranger to pick a meal for you. They order pizza. It’s pepperoni. You hate pepperoni. But, oh well, the agreement has been made, and now you have to pay for it! You can’t order anything else. The next opportunity to place an order is only in the morning. Enjoy your meal!
This is a very simplified version of what might happen when you give up your choice. It’s just a meal, but the situation is already unpleasant. Electing the government is much more important and complicated. The consequences last longer. Thus, vote!
Seriously.
If you make a decision not to vote, then someone else makes it for you.
Allowing someone to choose your food might go wrong. What if someone picks the representatives of your parliament for you? Or the president of your country?
It might seem like one vote is not important at all. And the elections can happen without you. That’s not quite right.
A lot of big choices in the world happened because of one or a few votes.
Here is the evidence.
Last year, the residents of Southington, a town in Connecticut, the United States, chose their district representative with a difference of only one vote. A winner of the elections, Christopher Poulos, said that many people took his victory very personally. Some people were regretting not showing up to the voting.
Additionally, your vote can help other people too.
“Not everyone can vote, and you should vote to protect their interest,” says Archon Fung, a professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. That applies to children, for example, who are not eligible to participate in the elections and protect their rights themselves. Representatives of your government are also in charge of foreign policy, so your vote can even influence people outside of your country.
And what if there are no decent candidates on the list? Still, vote!
First of all, there is almost always an opportunity to pick someone better out of the worse. When you choose a person, they become your representative, and you, as a citizen of a democratic state, can demand them to do a better job.
Another reason is that you probably don’t want to leave a leap for corrupted people when you don’t show up to elections. If you don’t check the box, someone might just check it for you and skew the results of the elections. Such things should never happen. If you voted, you used it. It’s gone. There is no one else who could use your spot.
Elect your government because it is your right! Just as a right to a peaceful protest, free press, religion, expression, and other human rights. All of that might be gone if you don’t vote.
Choose. One vote at a time.
Vote!
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Anastasiia Mozghova is a student at the American University in Bulgaria, majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication. She believes that every individual vote matters.
