What are you going to be doing on November 8th? I am going to go to my one Tuesday/Thursday class (which happens to be at 9:00 AM – lucky me) and then head to the Snow School (not, as I initially thought, the Senior Center) to cast my vote in the local Middletown elections. I hope you too will go out to the polls.

Voting is a basic Constitutional right, and it’s one that all citizens should exercise. Recently, though, it has become clear to me that some people in Middletown don’t want Wesleyan students to vote. They don’t want me to vote, nor do they want you to vote. Registrars tried to throw out our voter registrations. I’ve heard allegations of voter intimidation. Perhaps most importantly for me, the registrars have recently “discovered” a policy that means, since I live in the Butts, that I can no longer vote at the Senior Center close to Broad Street Books, where Wesleyan students have voted in the past.

Instead, I have to go all the way to the Snow School, which is significantly farther away. It’s hard for me to not feel as though this is an effort to make it significantly more difficult for students to vote. It’s not going to work, though; I’m not letting anyone disenfranchise me.

Maybe it’s my belief in the sanctity of voting rights, maybe it’s my conviction that voting is perhaps the most important act a citizen in a democracy can take, or maybe it’s a little bit that I’m nineteen and trying to keep me from doing something is a pretty good way of making me want to do it. But whatever the reasons, I am refusing to let anything keep me from exercising that basic right of casting a ballot in elections, and I urge you to do the same.

I hope that everyone who is registered to vote in Middletown, which is close to a thousand of us, gets informed about the candidates and the issues, and I also hope that you get a little angry. I’m angry that anyone would try to make it so hard for me to vote, because voting is such a fundamental right. Therefore, I am determined, regardless of whatever tactics anyone might use to try to get me to stay away from the polls, to cast my ballot on Tuesday. I hope that you are, too. So let’s get informed, know where we’re all voting, and, most importantly, get to the polls on November 8th.