(Dear reader: Today, on this day when you walk into a polling place, I share with you a column that I’ve written and rewritten and reworked several times over the past four years. I think it bears another run in this paper because the message is central to why we share this county, this state and this country. As you read this, over your morning coffee or your afternoon tea, as you learn through these pages what is going on in your world, as you consider the decisions you’ll be able to make today that will impact your future…. I hope you’ll take the following to heart.)

Fellow citizen; today is your day. In schools and churches, meeting halls and community centers, you and so many others will make your voice heard without speaking a word.

You’ll vote.

You’d better.

If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about the job your president or congressperson, your county clerk or dogcatcher is doing. Exercising your right to vote, gives you the right to speak out for change or to speak out against any injustice.

Many times, when people engage me in sharing what they believe to be political injustices in their particular realm I end up asking them the following question; “Did you vote?” If they say they didn’t, I hope to make them understand that their voice just lost a little bit of volume.

Today, I’m sharing with you some memorable quotes about voting through the years. Some of these are from people well known in the political arena, others not so. It’s their obvious passion for the most basic of American processes that makes the point.

“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.” John F. Kennedy

“To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.” Louis L’Amour

“The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal--that you can gather votes like box tops--is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.” Adlai Stevenson

“Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The freeman casting, with unpurchased hand, the vote that shakes the turret of the land.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils, is still choosing evil.” Jerry Garcia

“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” Andrew Lack

“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.” Lyndon B. Johnson