Registration deadlines for voting are approaching very fast, and honor of this I want to remind all of you to vote. I am not some cheesy celebrity video telling you to vote for some unimportant reason. I am just a very concerned millennial who fully believes that your vote matters. Here are the reasons why:

To those who don’t want to vote because you don’t think any of the bad things in this country can change because of an election, I want to remind you that every single law in this country, except for the first initial few, was the result of elections. You want to know why we have marriage equality? Because Obama managed to successfully nominate two supreme court justices who believed in marriage equality. Without them, the ruling may have gone the other way, and we would still be fighting for marriage equality. Obamacare, despite its faults, has drastically changed the insurance field which I believe to be good, since I can now stay on my parents’ health insurance till I am 26. If people back in 2008 decided to not vote because they believed Obama would be unable to solve any problems facing the country, we would still be fighting for these rights and many others. Voting is one of the few ways people can shape the way the country is run because you pick who runs it.

To those who think their vote does not matter because they are only one person, I want you to know that if every person who has a like-minded view on politics as you decided that they wouldn’t vote because they are just one person, you would never see the person you want in office. Millennials have one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any generation in the United States, as well as the most liberal viewpoints of any current generation eligible to vote. We are also the largest voting age block in the entire country. If every single person under the age of thirty decided to vote, the results of the election would be drastically different. We also know this because the younger generations tend to vote in presidential elections and not in mid-term elections which are when liberal representatives tend to lose their seats in the House and Senate.

If you want to see positive change in our country, then vote. I don’t care what your definition of positive is, so long as you take the steps to see it happen. You can’t complain about how messed up our nation is and then refuse to try to fix it. Maybe the people elected to congress will not change everything or even anything, but at least you tried to make a difference in how our nation is run. At least you managed to vote. Believe me, it will take you less than an hour to register and to vote. One hour for even just the potential of change sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. So go find out how to register, and do it.