Beginning next week, many UF students will – for the first time in their lives – have the chance to exercise a singular civic privilege: voting in a presidential election. They will not only be casting a vote for president, but also for the many other federal, state and local candidates and propositions on the ballot.
This political season, like many before it, has no shortage of acrimony and division. Some prominent candidates inspire equally passionate devotion from their supporters and loathing from their critics – here among our UF community just as across the rest of our nation.
We should not disregard these divisions or downplay their significance. The issues at stake are indeed very consequential. Yet our political differences should not stop us from appreciating a more fundamental truth that unites all Americans: the ability to choose our leaders. The right to vote is a sacred one and is central to the American experiment in self-government. We hope UF students will cherish this and exercise it. Especially since, sadly, it is a right that too many Americans take for granted.
Sometimes it takes a look around the world to appreciate anew the blessings we enjoy in the United States. Consider the plight of citizens in many other countries whose choices are controlled and whose votes are disregarded — or in some cases, who are not allowed to vote at all.
Earlier this summer, voters in Venezuela voted overwhelmingly for opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urruttia, only to see the Nicolas Maduro dictatorship overturn the will of the voters and send Gonzalez fleeing into exile in Spain to avoid almost certain imprisonment by the Maduro regime. Voters in Iran this year elected Masoud Pezeshkian as their president, but only after the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and the ruling clerics who hold ultimate power in the country had pre-selected Pezeshkian as part of a small slate of four approved candidates. In Russia this past March, autocrat Vladimir Putin “won” the presidential election with 88% of the vote after his main opponent Alexei Navalny was imprisoned and then murdered.
Elsewhere, citizens who recently enjoyed the right to vote have seen it snatched away and followed by vicious repression. Such is the case in Afghanistan, where two decades of free (albeit imperfect) elections have been replaced by the Taliban’s return to power. Five years ago the citizens of Hong Kong rose up in massive peaceful protest against the strangling of their once vibrant democracy by the Chinese Communist Party. Yet self-government in Hong Kong is no more.
Then there are the more than one billion people in China, and the many millions more in North Korea, Saudi Arabia and even just to our south in Cuba, who for decades have lived under dictatorships that do not even pretend to hold free and fair elections.
Of course, this global tour can rightly reaffirm the benefits of our democracy, but we need not look abroad to understand the value of our hard-earned right to vote. The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution calls us “to form a more perfect Union,” yet it was not until the passage of the 14th Amendment following the Civil War that citizenship and the rights pertaining thereto were defined to include recently freed slaves and their descendants.
The expansion of the right to vote itself took even longer and required more work and sacrifice. Suffragists finally secured the right to vote for women with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1919. The struggle for Black Americans took longer still and required even more sacrifice. John Lewis and other Freedom Riders were brutally beaten by white supremacists for the simple offense of trying to register Blacks to vote across the South in the early 1960s. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered trying to do the same in Mississippi in 1964. It was only the combined passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — well within the lifetimes of most UF students’ grandparents — that ensured all U.S. citizens of age could vote.
So we encourage UF students not to take your right to vote for granted. It has been secured by the hard struggles of our ancestors and is now passed on to you as a stewardship to be cherished, protected and exercised. The durability of American democracy depends on each new generation embracing its civic duties and carrying them forward. Informed voting is one of the first and most basic steps in taking up this mantle.
Professor William Inboden is Director of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education
Professor Matthew Jacobs is Director of the Bob Graham Center for Public Service.
