#vote pls
friendly reminder that if you are eligible to vote in the US, vote!! vote early if you can! if you are mailing in your ballot, send that shit in EARLY! make sure your vote counts!!!
and if you are in pennsylvania, make sure you follow this DUMB ASS RULE to prevent your mailed ballot from being thrown out in november!
visitVOTE.ORG if you need to register to vote, check if you are registered, find your polling location, etc.! feel free to leave any other helpful resources in the replies and i’ll edit this post with them ♥
I keep seeing this take (mostly on twitter) that goes roughly “well, we voted, and look what that got us!” I’m trying not to engage, but I need to say this once:
We are dealing with the consequences of not voting in 2016. I don’t want to diminish the importance of 2018 and 2020 in any way, but those elections were never going to undo 2016. These consequences were incredibly easy to see coming, but because they’re not immediate, people don’t seem to comprehend the cause and effect. Before I stopped reading twitter, I saw a tweet that said this is happening under a Democratic administration. The fact that six of the Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Republicans, and three of those six were appointed by Trump, doesn’t seem to mean anything.
Yes, you have to vote. This is WHY you have to vote. We said to vote in 2016 and people said it wouldn’t be that bad. Now that it is they say, what’s the point in voting? Well, we’re probably about to enter an era where your state government decides whether you can get an abortion or not. If that’s not a good reason to vote down ballot, I don’t know what is.
We don’t get a do-over for 2016. We didn’t get one in 2020 and we’re not getting one now. All we can do is try to deal with the consequences, which includes but is not limited to voting. I think people on twitter can’t accept this because they can’t deal with their part in it.
#Roe is being overturned because of a handful of people who didn’t want to vote for Clinton#they wanted her to *win* let’s be clear#but they didn’t want to help her do it—they wanted her to barely win so she could be taught a lesson#anyway we can mitigate the harm of that election now but we’ll literally never undo it–tags via leupagus
But…it’s also more than that.
We only got to a place where a President Trump was even *possible* because enough *people like us* have been saying “voting (blue) doesn’t matter” for **decades**.
Too many of us have been unwilling to accept incremental change, and electing a milquetoast Democrat who will maintain the status quo over an actively bigoted Republican who will directly make things worse, again and again and again.
And I get it. It’s frustrating, and disappointing, to see the change you long for remain out of reach even when you *personally* did the thing people said you needed to do already.
But if you *stop* voting blue because it didn’t make the change you want after once, twice, or ten times, you are part of the reason it continues not to work.
So much of our country is close enough to the margin—not necessarily of “people living there”, but of “people living there *who reliably vote*”—that in many places, if you can get just a few dozen (for the local level) or a few hundred (for the county level) or a few thousand (for the state level) more people to vote blue regularly, you can actually start changing things.
