An estimated 89 million registered voters did not vote in the 2024 general election.

I know many of them. They are family members, friends, neighbors, and people I meet in passing at high school football games, in checkout lines, and at the gym.
I meet hundreds more of them every day on social media.

And despite the abject chaos we find ourselves immersed in, a terrifying number of them are promising to stay home again this year.

Whether these people are apathetic, disheartened, or furious, they almost always say that they believe they are sending a message; that they are making a statement by abstaining. They tell themselves a story that their lack of action is a form of activism, conscientious objection in a war between two similar sides they choose to exempt themselves from.

Maybe you’re one of these people.

If so, I’m going to say this as plainly, kindly, and with as much compassion as I can: this won’t help anyone.

Though you may sincerely believe it, not voting is not a bold statement of virtue.
It is not a brave ethical stance.
It is not a strong message to a corrupt system.
Not voting is rendering yourself invisible.
It’s silencing your own voice.
It is an act of self-marginalization.
It’s allowing your future to be determined by other people and pretending that’s a moral victory.

Since no one in power knows why you didn’t vote, whatever your motivations might be, your abstinence becomes an empty, hollow gesture that accomplishes nothing beyond guaranteeing that you are erased from the equation. Whatever message you imagine you’re sending by opting out never reaches your intended recipients, and you end up saying nothing. It is a passionate protest made into the ether.

Not voting essentially gives strangers a blank they get to fill in on your behalf—since you aren’t present to tell anyone exactly what your values are, what boils your blood and breaks your heart and keeps you up at night. You willfully abdicate your own autonomy, and by doing so, you discard the courageous multitudes who came before you.

Generations of people spent their entire lives here unseen and voiceless, never having the opportunity to be heard, let alone the luxury of squandering that opportunity. Hundreds of millions of our predecessors braved bruises and bullets and death for the right for us to speak, a right that we have been handed upon arrival here and you now so casually decline.

It’s staggering to consider where we might be right now as a nation if even a fraction of those 89 million Americans had decided two years ago to make the smallest effort to help carry the collective at the polls: the lives that could have been saved, the wars we might have avoided, the suffering that could have been prevented, the sociopaths who might never have been sworn in.

The only question right now is how much of the future are you willing to relinquish to the authors of this current brutality.

Participating in the electoral process is one of the greatest responsibilities one has as a citizen in a democracy, and to simply opt out speaks to a fiction that believes you are not affected by your own silence. But you are. We all are. Those more vulnerable than you surely are.

Look, I’m under no illusions about America. I’m aware of the brokenness of our system, the need to expand the available party choices, and the corruption of special interests and dark money, and I’m as exasperated as you are.

But here’s what I know.

White nationalists will be voting.
ICE defenders will be voting.
Pedophile protectors will be voting.
Phobic Christians will be voting.
Insurrectionists will be voting.
Genocide supporters will be voting.
Book banners will be.
Climate change deniers will be.
Anti-vaxxers will be.
People who believe Fox News is gospel truth will be.
People who think Trump was sent by God will be.

The people who infuriate and terrify you, those you are frustrated with and disgusted by: the hateful and the small-minded and the cruel who drive you to tears and to hopelessness? They will be voting. They will be explicit. They will not allow someone else to interpret what their silence means.

They will speak clearly and loudly, and unless you cast your vote—you will offer no dissenting opinion in a time when it is desperately needed.

In that way you will be a willing accomplice to them.

Please don’t relinquish the microphone to the bigots and the fear mongers and the predatory preachers.

I don’t know what twists you up inside or grieves your heart.

I don’t know the dreams you hold or the future you hope to see.

I don’t know what you want your life to say, and no one else will unless you actually say it: explicitly, clearly, loudly.

Make a statement that truly counts right now because it will be counted.

Please, vote.