Should You Really Bother to Vote? What Does It Matter?

Many people ask themselves these questions and decide it's too much of a bother to vote and it doesn't matter anyway. It's worth thinking a little more.

November 15, 1917:Under orders from the superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed women. They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked. 

What was the crime these women had committed? They participated in a demonstration to allow women to vote. No kidding.

May 7, 1955 · Belzoni, Mississippi

Rev. George Lee, one of the first black people registered to vote in Humphreys County, used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote. White officials offered Lee protection on the condition he end his voter registration efforts, but Lee refused and was murdered.

August 13, 1955 · Brookhaven, Mississippi

Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn by a white man in broad daylight while dozens of people watched. The killer was never indicted because no one would admit they saw a white man shoot a black man. Smith had organized blacks to vote in a recent election.

June 21, 1964 · Philadelphia, Mississippi

James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner, young civil rights workers who were trying to register Mississippi African Americans to vote, were arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders. They were shot, and their bodies were buried in an earthen dam.

Is there still any doubt whether voting is "worth it"?