This Tuesday’s election will be special for me. I’m not particularly excited about any candidate, but this will be my first time voting in America. Last year, I became a U.S. citizen and fulfilled my lifelong dream of being an American. Now I’ll finally get a say in who represents me in the country I’ve admired since childhood, marking a meaningful milestone for me amid our bleak politics.
I voted many times in my home country of Argentina, where voting is compulsory between the ages of 18 and 70. On election Sundays, I’d trot down to my polling place, wait in line (sometimes for hours), and cast a ballot or leave it blank. My decision to vote belonged to the state, not to me. Throughout my voting life in Argentina, the menu of candidates was atrocious: I spent my first several adult years under Peronist rule, and basically all candidates were collectivists of various stripes.
For eight years before I became a citizen, I lived in America without a vote. I came here in 2017, built a career and a family, and lived under laws I had no say in, including immigration laws that shaped nearly every aspect of my life. I could speak, write, and argue, and I did. But when Americans chose who would make those laws, I watched from afar, unable to participate. Now I’m an active participant, and that’s why the right to choose my representatives isn’t an abstraction to me.
The candidates in this election are hardly freedom fighters. Some candidates are better than others, to be sure, but no realistic candidate I know of fully stands for this country’s founding principle: the protection of individual rights. America’s own founding promise has become a political rarity.
But despite my reservations about the candidates, I’m still excited to vote. I’m voting by choice, not out of an obligation to the state.
A key principle of our constitutional republic, as the Declaration puts it, is that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent means that the government holds only the powers we delegate to protect our rights. In free elections, we choose who exercises those powers—we choose our agents. This time, the vote is mine, and the government has to come and ask for it. It’s a small act, but it captures the right relationship between the individual and the state: the government works for me, not the other way around.
We often forget that we’re not voting for our overlords, our rulers, or our bosses. We’re voting for our agents. That’s why the word “just” in the Declaration matters: I can help choose who governs, but my vote can’t authorize them to take away anyone’s rights. I don’t have the right to trample the rights of others. By virtue of the delegated powers, the government has no such power, either.
Alas, the government doesn’t always respect those limits and often arrogates to itself illegitimate powers. That’s one of the reasons why many people abstain. But choosing an agent doesn’t mean endorsing everything that person stands for. I can judge one candidate better than another at protecting rights without approving either candidate’s violations of them. Others think voting is futile, and there’s something to that. I don’t pretend that my vote will change anything concrete, but if measurable impact were the test, few individual acts of civic participation would pass. I’m voting simply to express my judgment about who may act in my name. In the future, I may choose not to vote; that choice will be mine, and I won’t be punished for it.
Voting is an important part of our political system, but it doesn’t automatically make a government legitimate. Protecting individual rights does. And voting is neither the only nor the most important tool at my disposal. As I’ve argued before, speaking up and exercising our freedoms, chiefly our First Amendment rights, is essential to preserving and restoring American founding principles.
If no candidate stands for individual rights, it’s because the idea has lost ground in our culture. It’s my job, and that of everyone who shares this principle, to speak up for it, defend it and change minds. Changing the menu of candidates depends on the American people embracing and advocating for the right ideas that made this country free in the first place. And this is a right everyone on American soil has, not only citizens.
After almost a decade in America, this Tuesday I’ll finally get a say on who represents me. After voting, I’ll drive to work and keep doing the most important thing I can do: make the case for the ideas that brought me to this country, so that one day they’re on the ballot, too.
Agustina Vergara Cid is a columnist for the Southern California News Group