As Election Day draws closer, millions of young people across this country are asking the same question. “Does my vote really matter?” It is easy to see why this question comes up every four years, especially this year. Both of the major party candidates are over 70, and according to polls, neither represent the philosophy of a lot of voting students.   

     Young people have, historically, been left out of the political process. It’s only been 50 years since the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1970,  by means of amending the Voting Rights Act. For a majority of this country’s life, millions of students were drafted into wars that they had no say in whatsoever. 

      This, as with many conventions of the time, came to a halt in the mid-to-late ‘60s. The Vietnam War was the first in our country’s history to be broadcasted to the vast majority of the nation, and the first time the draft was brought into question. It was also a cry for racial justice and an end to segregation. These two movements had some of their most passionate members under the then-voting age. 

     I want to tell all of the potential voters in our school, and all across America, your vote does count. By not voting this November, you’re spitting in the face of the generations before us who risked jail time or being killed for what they believed in. 

  Students of today have a weapon more powerful than any gun or firehose: the ballot. We can tap into the power the founding fathers bestowed upon the people of this great nation to shape a future that’s for us and for those to come later. 

   America, and the world, is dealing with a lot of things right now, from Covid-19 to climate change. If we just stay home, why would politicians care about us? Why should they spend time and resources talking about issues that affect young people, student loans for example, if we never vote? 

    I do believe that elected officials do have responsibilities to get people to want to vote, but we do need to give them a sign that their work will pay off. If they think that racial justice reforms or a plan to deal with climate change will alienate older voters, who vote in much larger numbers, then those issues will be dropped and grandmas and grandpas will be seen as the central focus for their campaigns. 

    Even if politicians don’t seem like they care much about issues affecting our generation, if we make them think that they’ll lose without us and win with us, they’ll act on those topics to get us to pay attention to them. We must also do research and vote for people who care about the issues we care about to make it clear we’re not kidding around. If we don’t vote, the mindset will be “you ignore us. Nothing happens.” Unless we make it loud and clear what we want at the ballot box, we might as well go back to burning draft cards.