Last Tuesday, November 3, 2015, was an election day. In my home state, Pennsylvania, three vacancies on the PA Supreme Court were filled. Additionally, voters decided on the members of the school board, town council, and city council. This was an important election day.
"State courts can't be as important as the Supreme Court, though," you may think.
Actually, state courts get to cases first when the cases regard state laws and constitutions. The Supreme Court may never get to those cases, largely because the voters in each individual state decide who gets on their state courts, and the judicial system trusts the electorate.
"What electorate?"
Good question.
The US Census Bureau confirms that the percentage of young adults aged 18-24 who vote has decreased in every presidential election since 1962. Can you imagine how rare it is for a college student to vote in an election like the one that just occurred in PA? According to Ballotpedia, 59.5% of registered registered voters cast votes in the 2012 election, but only 36% voted in the 2014 midterm election. Do we even want to know how low the 2015 rate was? Of course, it is almost easy to form "political opinions" when CNN loves promoting Hillary Clinton and Buzzfeed can't get enough of Bernie Sanders, when Jeb Bush has $128 million raised for his campaign and Donald Trump is a verified meme. But do we expect major news sources to shove information about the school board in our faces until we bleed internal political efficacy? We can't, and we shouldn't.
I'm no expert on American politics, so writing about this actually feels odd. Many Americans, myself included, tend to believe that politics are either too complicated or too hopeless for the average person.
Explaining our opinions becomes painful and draining. Especially as young people, we feel like there are only two kinds of attitudes to choose between, because these are the kinds of people we see most often: the confident, polarized ones and the unassuming, apathetic ones. We think we have to choose... and it is easier to choose the latter. 
Researching candidates turns into a chore at the very bottom of our to-do list... you know, the part of the to-do list that no one realistically reaches by the end of any given week.
Truly, for a college student to travel for voting purposes--or to think ahead and apply for an absentee ballot--is considerably difficult, and many states don't make it easy for people to get registered in the first place. And, since we are already stressed out and over-scheduled, the idea of going through all this additional trouble... it hurts. I was lucky to live so close to my hometown that voting was not a terrible burden. So I'm not saying that the decision to abstain from voting is ridiculous.
I am saying it's curable. You can vote next time. I want to tell you a story about how good it felt to be Voter #289.
After being driven from my Haverford College apartment to my hometown (about a 25-minute trip in average traffic), I went to the community center with my parents to vote. We saw conflicting yard signs jockeying for position on the lawn and laughed, mocking the logic of whomever thought that surrounding the path to the ballots with boldface names would change the voters' minds... then soberly acknowledged that, yeah, maybe overwhelming advertising sometimes does accomplish its goals. Inside, we conversed blithely with the volunteers about Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" movies. I don't remember how that came up, but I remember that there were only two other voters in line. And I distinctly recall my number: 289. It sounded so finite. If there were 289 objects in front of me and someone said, "Count them," I could count them without becoming terribly bored. Yes, I am registered to vote in a small town, but 289 is roughly half of the number of people who went to the local high school's homecoming dance this year. 289 is minute. As the curtain fell to obscure my form and I tapped the touch screen quietly, I knew the rumors were true: my vote counts.
And so does yours.
To learn more about how to vote as a college student, visit Rock the Vote. If our generation commits to becoming an active, educated part of the electorate... well, that's a better plan for making America great than I have heard from anybody else. Next time I vote, I will be happy to be a larger number than 289.
