It’s voting season right now in the United States–a fact you’ve probably been unable to escape if you live here. Next week we’ll have local, state, and federal midterm elections, and we’ll even have elections in the American Translators Association.

This blog isn’t about politics. I don’t actually want to talk about the people running in any of those elections right now, so don’t worry. But since some things are so universally important that they deserve a personal appeal, I want to get personal for a second here, and I want to do so publicly. Here’s the thing: every day now we hear the words “vote,” “voting,” “voters.” These are big words for me personally, because in 2006, I had the vote taken away from me.

I was a registered voter with a legally valid voter registration card and a driver’s license with matching address (before the voter ID law!), and yet I was told by the county poll workers that I was not allowed to vote. I tried to vote via provisional ballot while things got straightened out, and I later received a letter from the state of Texas telling me that my vote was thrown out. Which means that while lots of other people hear the word “disenfranchised” in news reports and it sounds distant, because I was disenfranchised it sounds immediate and ugly and awful to me. I want to make sure people know what that’s like. So many people around me say they won’t vote because their vote “doesn’t count anyway” or they “have no choices.” I now know from experience that this type of “my vote doesn’t count” sensation is not reality; it’s actually a form of despair. And I totally get that. I too feel emotionally that there is no hope of getting the candidate I want to win where I live. I too often feel that no candidate is really who I want, and it’s really more of a “lesser of two evils” choice. I might feel that way right now if I thought about it for five minutes. However, that’s not reality. When your vote legally does not count, that is reality. And really being told by your government that you legally have no say whatsoever in who is in charge or by extension what they do to you–because the fact of being in charge means that they will do something to you–is an utterly horrible feeling. It’s worse than despair, although I realize that’s hard to imagine. Despair is the subjective sensation that there’s no hope. Disenfranchisement is the actual absence of hope. (Thankfully temporary in my case–just under two years.)

For many, many years of our history, African Americans and women didn’t have the legal right to vote. And even after they gained the legal right, some whites and men worked desperately for years to prevent them from exercising their rights. If you know about (or look up) Freedom Summer, you know that in the South especially, people were murdered for trying to help African Americans vote. And while there was markedly less murder in the case of women’s suffrage, the injustice of how long it took for women to win suffrage is a topic that can and does fill entire books. Lesser forms of race- or sex-based voter suppression still continue today. Why am I talking about this, you ask? These are not my experiences. I was disenfranchised in part because I’m a woman, but mainly due to administrative idiocy: confused policies and stupid choices at the registration offices that caused them to effectively delete me from the rolls. But since I felt so horrible, so violated, by a disenfranchisement that had little to do with who I am, I can just begin to imagine how horrible and how violated a person must feel to be disenfranchised specifically because of who they are. And that is a part of our history–a part that isn’t even over.

So back to despair: please don’t let despair win. Despair does nothing but convince you to forfeit any hope that’s genuinely there. Despair leads you to sit by and let bad things happen, which is maybe part of why some religions have historically considered it a sin. I don’t think it’s a sin, but surrendering to it isn’t okay. Those of us without the right to vote, those of us whose votes really don’t count, deserve to have you read up on the candidates, pick one–even just one candidate in one race if you don’t want to vote in all the races–and then get out there and exercise the rights that we can’t. By failing to do so, you’re oppressing yourself and you’re helping the people oppressing us. By refusing to vote because you’re sure your candidate won’t win (and worse, infecting others with this view!), you’re guaranteeing s/he won’t. By choosing not to vote, you’re saying you don’t care what happens to you, and you’re saying you don’t care what happens to us.

People have fought and died to vote in the US, and they’re fighting and dying in other parts of the world still. By not voting, you’re making that mean less. So please, please vote. Even if to you voting is about the lesser of two evils, that’s absolutely fine–please vote for the lesser evil for us.