Why you should vote
Dear Future Ohio Voter,
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you were already planning on voting – or, at the very least, you’re curious about Ohio’s upcoming election on November 3rd.
Across Ohio, we’re struggling to afford tuition, rent, transportation, and groceries. Our tax dollars are being used to sponsor a genocide in Palestine. At home, ICE is terrorizing our neighbors. And in spite of the ways the game has been rigged, the ultra-wealthy wouldn’t be trying so hard to make it more difficult for us to vote if our votes truly didn’t matter.
We are not here to tell you that voting is the ultimate or the only tool for making change, or that this is our only way out of our present circumstances, or that it’s disrespectful of all the people who died for our right to vote to stay home (feel like we hear that one a lot as young people). Rather, we’d like to remind you that voting is one important tool in our tool box for making change.
It is often a strategic choice about which candidate we think we are more likely to be able to move on the issues that matter to us, rather than a wholehearted embrace of a mythical perfect candidate who exactly reflects every single one of our values.
The majority of our politicians are out-of-touch with the needs of young Ohioans. They went to college in the 20th century, sent their children to Yale, and collect a paycheck while we can’t afford tuition. The politicians who put us into this mess know they can’t get us out of it (or won’t, for their wallet’s sake) and now they’re scrambling to keep their jobs.
Nobody would be trying so hard to stop Ohioans from voting by mail, to purge voter registration records, to purposefully make it difficult for voters, if it didn’t matter.
We hired them. We can fire them too.
Voting isn’t going to fix all of our problems right away – change takes time and requires sustained organizing beyond just election season – but it is our shot at making fixing our problems easier in the long run. The clock is ticking down to November 3rd. Read this guide and head to the polls.