Even One Vote…

I have never taken voting for granted. I listened to my immigrant grandparents recall studying for their naturalization tests so they could become US citizens and thus have the right to vote. In school, I learned about people who fought and lost their lives for the right to vote. I eagerly anticipated the first election in which I would reach the age of eligibility and be allowed to vote in a presidential election (it was 1980, Ronald Regan defeated Jimmy Carter).

When my daughter was very young—just a couple of years old—I held her hand as we went together up the steps and into the lobby of the church that was my neighborhood polling place in Oakland, California. I brought her with me as I stepped behind the small curtain of the voting booth so she could look up and watch me as I marked my ballot. I remember her peering up at me very intently (in the way young children will do when their parents explain stuff to them that they really don’t know or care much about but that they can tell really matters in some way) as I explained to her what I was doing and its importance in the simplest possible terms I could muster. I wanted to imprint on her—as indelibly I had marked my ballot—the importance of this act that is of such singular importance to democracies as one of the cornerstones of our freedoms.

I’m not sure, but I like to think some of that stuck because by 2000 when she was ten years old, I sat with her in front of the television, our hands clasped in anticipation (me with a good deal more anxiety than her ten-year-old self likely understood or noticed) as we watched election returns together. She was eager to see the results of this exciting, nationwide contest she had been hearing so much about and learning about at school, to see whether Al Gore or George W. Bush would win. But it was the year of ‘hanging chads’ and the election (much to her great disappointment after having been permitted to stay awake for hours past her normal bedtime) would not be called for many days to come.

By 2008, she was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, old enough to campaign and to vote—and Barak Obama was her candidate. I’ll never forget hearing the joy in her voice—she called me while I was walking back from a neighbor’s home where we had been watching election returns—the joy so many felt that night when his history-making victory was announced. The thrill of the win was obviously present in her voice, but it was more than that—it was also the fulfillment that can only come from active participation in the process and a deeper understanding of what such a victory meant. That’s what I was hearing, that’s what was so richly resonant in her voice that night, along with the hope that had been so much more than just a slogan for the Obama campaign.

I’m proud to say that my daughter has remained an engaged, well-informed citizen—I like to think it was all because of that hand-holding trip up the steps of the polling place when she was so tiny (it probably wasn’t but I’m hanging onto that possibility). But whether any of what I’ve recounted is similar to your own experience or not, we can recognize together that this is a decisive moment in our history—there have been others. I share these personal reflections with you not because they are extraordinary. They are not. Rather, I recount them to remind us that elections are among other things milestones in the lives of nations and their people. We remember where we voted, where and with whom we watched election returns, how we felt as ballots were tallied and decisions rendered that would decide the fates of millions—for moments, for election cycles, or for decades but increasingly in ways that may be irreversible as our planet among other things, hangs in the balance.

I can’t say that there has never been a more important election, nor that there has never been one in which voting has mattered as much. There are clear stakes that your vote will decide, and whether and how you cast your vote will shift the tides of history. If you have not yet cast your vote, do not let this moment pass without your engagement in the process, your action, your mark in the making of history. Do not let apathy, or discontent, or distraction, or disinformation discourage you from walking into your polling place, or casting your mail-in ballot. Be part of the creation of this milestone moment in your own life and in the life of this nation.

In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.”

We have always been a nation in the making, inventing and reinventing ourselves, continually—we must hope—in an ongoing act of reaching towards that more perfect union that we have not yet become, the one we must believe we can make out of both the enormous mistakes of our past and from which we must learn, and from the beauty and brilliance we enact when we are at our best. We are a thing we must believe in and that we must nurture. It takes hard work, and the ability to endure.

For those who have not yet voted, I encourage you to make the indelible marks on your ballot this November that will give you the fulfillment of engagement in this great experiment we so greatly treasure, democracy. Vote to be part of it; vote to preserve it; and vote to honor the lives of those who fought and died for the privilege of doing so. As the final line in the poem “One Vote” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil states, “And even one letter, one vote can make the difference for every bright thing.”

UW resources for navigating the 2024 election

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