This is an important election, not like some I remember when it really didn’t seem to make any difference who was elected. Voting is our right and our privilege. Women have not had the vote for 100 years yet. And the picture I have in my mind is of the purple thumbs of the people in the Middle East and Africa who are voting for the first time.

Speaking of the first time, I went to register to vote while I was still in college, but I couldn’t prove I graduated from high school. I had to take a literacy test. This is 1968, with the Voting Rights Act still new. I was incensed, but I had a much better understanding of the struggle to vote. The only time I missed voting was in 1994 when we moved to Tucson, and we just didn’t get registered in time. Enter Fife Symington in Arizona. Hey, we left Arizona a week after Evan Mecham was elected, and we come back to Symington.

There are a lot of articles and innuendo floating around about being denied the right to vote this year. I’m not sure what’s true and what isn’t. I do know that NOW is the time to make sure you are registered and have everything you need to vote. The days are gone when all you had to do was give your name at the polling place. I made sure my license has our current address, so I can’t be denied my ballot. You are running out of time to register before deadlines. Check. Re-check. Verify. Get your ID ready. Do what you need to.

I had my tutoring student, who is 19, tell me he wasn’t sure he was going to vote. It didn’t seem worth it, he said. I went politely ballistic, with a brief lesson on the struggles for suffrage. I said I didn’t care who he voted for, but he had to vote.

Here’s an interesting article: Voting as a Responsibility: How Hard Should It Be. Do your part and be ready.

And…as part of my own personal attempt to support and practice civil discourse, here’s an editorial by Captain Mark Kelly on this problem.