Many states are having primary elections, including here in Colorado.  And, of course, midterms will be coming in November.  I am actively participating in the election campaign of Jason Crow for Congress in the 6^th District.  I know there are many who feel that their vote won’t count for much or that voting itself is unimportant.  Both of those positions are inaccurate.  Here’s a bit of a history lesson.

George W. Bush won the Presidency in 2000 over Al Gore (who actually had 543,000 more total popular votes) by a disputed 537 Florida votes.  Trump won the Presidency in 2016 by carrying Wisconsin by 22,748 votes, Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes and Michigan by 13,225 votes – a total of around 80,000 votes, and over 90 million eligible voters didn’t vote.  Hillary Clinton had a popular vote margin of nearly 2.9 million votes.  In 1960, John Kennedy won the Presidency by a margin of approximately 100,000 votes.  In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the popular vote by approximately 250,000 votes.  And, of course, more recently, Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore in the Alabama special election to fill Jeff Sessions’ Senate seat by around 20,000 votes, and a Virginia House of Delegates election came down to 1 vote.  There are many instances of elections being won or lost by very small margins, so it is really true that every vote counts.

And, voting truly is a privilege.  African American men were unable to vote legally until the 15^th Amendment passed in 1870 but were powerless to exercise the right freely until the Civil Rights laws of 1966.  Women did not receive the vote until the 19^th Amendment was passed in 1920.  Native Americans were not considered U.S. citizens until 1924 and many states prohibited them from voting until 1957.  Residents of U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico, are only allowed to vote in primaries, not general elections.

The Nuremberg Laws passed in Germany in 1935 disenfranchised Jews from the right to vote.  Women were not granted the right to vote in Qatar until 2003, in Kuwait until 2005 and in Saudi Arabia until 2015.  Severely restricted racial voting rights were prevalent in the Apartheid years of South Africa.  In fact, South African black women didn’t receive the right to vote until 1994.

Interestingly, 22 nations, with an estimated 744 million people, make voting mandatory.  Should we have this in the United States?  Probably not.  But we should encourage this right and privilege.  If you do not vote, you bear an even greater responsibility for the election’s outcome.