If you didn’t know, Thursday, May 1, 2014 was Law Day at the Riverside County Law Library.  As part of the festivities, Judge Jackson Lucky was our keynote speaker.  Judge Lucky’s presentation on voting rights and the importance of exercising your right to vote was both informative and very interesting. He mentioned that often times, especially for young people, that the sentiment that every vote counts seems quite far fetched. Some questions that Judge Lucky fleshed out were how can one vote possibly have any real effect in a sea of millions of others? and how can one voice be heard? 

As for myself, and many of my friends, we have recently reached the age where are now able to vote.  For the most part, however, we don’t really see a reason to vote.  After all, most of the time it seems as though the candidates on both sides seem to be saying the same things with different words.  Beyond that, even if we were to vote, ten or twenty votes couldn’t possibly have any real effect.  Ten or twenty votes won’t matter if there are thousands on the other side voting against ours.

As it turns out, though, many significant elections are actually determined by just a small fraction of votes.  In fact, as Judge Lucky pointed out, there are numerous examples in which the winner was decided by as little as two votes.  This means that even 1 or 2 votes have the potential to completely change an elections’ outcome.  Even if at the time it may seem like your vote doesn’t matter, you can never be certain of how an election will play out.  Maybe it does turn out to be a landslide victory in the other side’s favor and one vote was barely anything more than a raindrop in a enormous ocean, or maybe it will be the vote that pushes your side to victory.  Either way it never really hurts to let your voice be heard. 

Judge Lucky’s presentation inspired me to think more about what it means to have the right to vote and to exercise it.  Hopefully it did the same for others like myself who hadn’t previously considered voting.

Written by: Drew Williamson, Library Volunteer