Greg Millard, Kwantlen Department of Political Science

If you want change, you must vote.

Change requires action. Street protests, online petitions, and other forms of social action are all
important. But the fact remains that the actual decisions are made by governments. To control
government is to control a key instrument for change; and the vote is a key tool for controlling
governments.

To decline to vote is, in effect, to endorse the status quo.

Furthermore, voting is an act of freedom. Not the freedom of the marketplace, to buy and sell - all too
often, the main type of freedom we think about - but the freedom of the citizen to make decisions for
the whole society. We would never surrender our private lives to the control of people who take no
account of who we are and what we want. But in declining to vote, we turn over our communities to
those who need take no account of us.

To neglect the vote is to sit in the stalls like sheep, dull-eyed and dumb, before matters that affect your
life.

To be fully free, you must vote.