The first time I voted was significant for me on a very personal level. The first ballot I ever cast was in a local school board election and I voted for–and helped to elect–my father to a four-year term, the first of two he would serve. This was a meaningful event for me in part because I had learned from my father and my mother the importance of participating in the electoral process, at every level. I also had learned from them, around the dinner table and in conversations over the years, that voting is itself a political act: whatever the outcome of any given election, one’s vote was an expression of one’s commitments and beliefs.

I found this truth powerful and enabling and it has sustained my engagement in the American democratic process through all these years. These are lessons that I have tried to pass on to my own children who are themselves engaged and active citizens and I am proud that the family tradition of active participation in the fundamental mechanisms of the democratic process continues. Although these are trying times and our American experiment in democracy is under unprecedented pressure and threat today, so long as citizens take seriously the right to vote and work to protect it for all, there is hope that our great and collective dream of self-governance “shall not perish from the earth.”