John,

Today is National Voter Registration Day! The right to vote and the right to free and fair elections are fundamental pillars of our democracy. The upcoming midterm elections are some of the most important of our time.

Have you checked your voter registration status lately?

Our freedoms are on the ballot––the freedom to be safe from gun violence, to choose what we read, to decide whether and when to have kids. Extremist politicians around the country are trying their best to send our country backward decades. Look at what the Supreme Court has done. And the radical extremists, they just want to divide people so they can maintain power and “own the libs.” They don’t have ideas about how to solve people’s problems; they actually want people to be angry and pitted against each other.

So winning elections is essential: to save our schools, our right to a fairer economy, our democracy and our freedoms. Make sure you’re registered to vote now.

We win by voting and getting people out to vote. Elections really do matter. And the vote really does count. Yes, everyone always tells you to vote, and voting may feel radically insufficient. But (and now I’ll put on my high school social studies teacher hat) without voting and getting people out to vote, we never get to a majority. And without that majority, we never get to influence policy on an ongoing and sustained basis.

We’ve cared, we’ve fought, we’ve showed up––now we vote.

In unity,
Rand Weingarten
AFT President