By James Jimenez
Yes, twenty-five.
- Make Your Voice Heard: You know how they say you can start complaining when you’ve registered to vote? What they mean is that registering to vote makes politicians sit up and take notice of your opinion. They start listening to you – they start hearing your voice, so you’re not just screaming at the television anymore.
- Support Your Community: Because your vote determines who gets to exercise authority in your community, you are able to directly impact local services like schools, roads, and emergency services.
- Protect Democracy: Because voting is a fundamental element of a democratic society, democracy diminishes when you don’t vote.
- Hold Elected Officials Accountable: Voting allows you to reward the performance of good elected officials by voting them back into office; or it can allow you to penalize bad performance – or even bad behavior (because, of course, elected officials have to be held to a higher standard of personal behavior) – by voting them out of office.
- Influence Policy: When you vote for the people who hold the same values as you, your vote can shape important policies on healthcare, education, and more. When you vote instead for just whoever gives you the biggest bribe, then your vote only gives power to people who cannot be trusted with it.
- Honor Those Who Fought for Voting Rights: Many people have fought and sacrificed for the right to vote. When you exercise that right, do it in their memory.
- It’s Your Civic Duty: How many times have you been told that voting is a responsibility that comes with being a citizen? You can survive hearing it again: Voting is a responsibility that comes with being a citizen
- Create Change: If you don’t like how things are being run in your community, your city, or your country, voting gives you a way to legitimately effect change. Doing it any other way is just power-tripping.
- Prevent Discrimination: Voting helps to combat discrimination and ensure equal rights for all, especially when you vote for those who value diversity, equality, and inclusion. No, DEI is not a bad word.
- Support the Issues You Care About: Whether it’s climate change, education, healthcare, or free internet access for all, voting allows you to support the national leaders that prioritize the issues that matter to you.
- Impact Local Government: Local elections directly affect decisions on zoning, public safety, and community services, basically determining the economic future of your community, whether you can walk around your neighborhood at night, or whether your barangay has a working deep well in times of drought.
- Shape the Future: You can elect forward looking officials into office, or you can choose people who are stuck in the past. Either way, your vote influences the direction your country takes for future generations.
- Support Minority Rights: Voting can help protect the rights of marginalized groups, especially if you vote for a legit party-list organization.
- Counteract Misinformation: Some politicians play fast and loose with facts, preferring ‘alternate versions’ that are more convenient for them and their political purposes. Voting these kinds of politicians out of office helps to ensure that political decisions are made based on accurate information, regardless of how inconvenient that might be.
- It’s Easy: Voting is usually a simple and straightforward process. The lines at the polling place may be long, but waiting your turn is worth it.
- Voting is Empowering: It makes you – your needs, your wants, your opinions – relevant to the people in power who, let’s face it, would not really care about you if you weren’t a voter.
- Influence Economic Policy: Do you know why you pay value-added tax on literally everything? That’s because at one time, a legislator was elected into office who convinced everyone that it was a good idea.
- Improve Healthcare: Voting for good leaders can bring better healthcare policies and access to services. Actually, voting for good leaders can bring better policies, period.
- Support Education: Your vote for elected officials who understand and see the value of education, can improve funding and policies for schools and universities. And it wouldn’t be a moment too soon.
- Environmental Protection: Voting for the right leaders can lead to the formulation of policies that protect the environment, address climate change, and – most importantly – shield us from the effects of the environmental damage we’ve already inflicted on ourselves.
- Promote Accountability: Voting gives you the reins of government, and – if you’re not lazy or complicit – you can hold politicians accountable for their actions.
- Participate in History: Every election is a historic event, and your vote is part of that history. Incidentally, “historic” and “historical” are not synonyms and are not interchangeable.
- Foster a Sense of Community: Voting brings communities together to make collective decisions. And even if the members of your community don’t always agree with each other, remember the lesson some people apparently missed: unity isn’t the absence of disagreement. Rather, it is the ability to continue working together for the common good, despite those disagreements.
- Influence Judicial Appointments: You hardly ever think of it in these terms, but your vote can affect who is appointed to the courts, influencing laws for years to come. Take, for instance, Penera v. COMELEC – the Supreme Court decision that, essentially, allowed premature campaigning to become the problem that it is now.
- Influence Foreign Policy: Your vote can decide how we treat with our international voters. If you doubt it, just review the history of the Philippines’ claims in the South China Sea: people (that Filipinos voted for) fought a foreign superpower and won international recognition for our claims, just as other people (who Filipinos also voted for) decided not to assert the win.
I can give twenty-five more reasons, but you get the point. Voting’s great, and it empowers ordinary citizens like you and me. But, at the end of the day, you’re going to have to remember: you can’t vote if you don’t register. And you only have September 30, 2024 to get it done.
