Exercise your right to vote.

• Author: White, John G., III
• Position: President's page

Soon it will be time to vote in an election that will decide who becomes the new president of the United States during a time of economic crisis and our divided nation at war.

For the first time in our history, an African-American male will run for president on one ticket, and a woman will run as vice president on the other.

Crucial. Momentous. Historical.

Yet, sadly, so many will decide to sit this one out if Florida's track record on voting in general elections is any indication. From 1954 through 2004, the average voter turnout in general elections in Florida was 65 percent.

What are the excuses of the other 35 percent of registered voters who don't bother to show up at the polls? You've heard these cynical and apathetic responses before:

"My one little vote won't matter anyway."

"I don't trust politicians. Their promises just sound like more of the same."

"My life is so busy; I really haven't had the time to study the candidates' platforms on the issues."

While the Florida youth voter turnout--the 18- to 29-year-old citizens --tripled in the January primary, it was still only 13 percent, up from 4 percent in 2000. The Pew Charitable Trusts, the source for those numbers, concluded that "college students are deeply concerned about issues, involved personally as volunteers, and ready to consider voting. But they want political leaders to be positive, to address real problems, and to call on all Americans to be constructively involved."

As your Florida Bar president, I ask all of you to vote and to be constructively involved in our country that depends on citizen participation to make democracy work.

As President Harry Truman said, "It's not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It's the hand that casts the ballot."

Who will ever forget the election controversy of 2000 that swirled at the Florida Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court, and in the end named George W. Bush the victor by only 537 votes?

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Each and every vote does count.

Voting is a precious privilege, right, and duty of citizenship that has been hard-fought for in America.

The "Night of Terror" on November 15, 1917, at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, marks the dark period when members of the National Women's Party were beaten, pushed, and thrown into prison cells after picketing President Woodrow Wilson at the White House for women's right to vote. For weeks, the only water came from an open pail and their colorless...