By Rev. Ra Shad Frazier-Gaines, MPA, MBA
You voted. You did everything right. You waited in line, learned about the ballot, and even brought a neighbor. But after all that, the potholes on your street are still there. The school nearby still lost teachers. Your neighborhood is still waiting for the investment everyone talked about. If you feel tired, you have every right to be. I am not here to blame you.
But I do want to be honest about what happens if you stay home on November 3rd. Not voting does not punish the system that let you down. It actually rewards it.
Here is what your absence actually does.
First, not voting makes you invisible to the people in power. Campaigns, parties, and officials look at who voted last time and who didn’t. They spend their time, money, and attention on the people who show up. If your neighborhood votes, you get a visit. If it doesn’t, you might just get a flyer, if anything. When you stop voting, you don’t send a message of protest. You just become someone they can ignore.
Second, it hands your past victories back to the people who opposed them. In 2024, Missourians did the right thing at the ballot box. We voted to protect reproductive rights. We voted to raise the minimum wage and guarantee paid sick leave. Within months, lawmakers repealed the paid sick leave. Now the reproductive rights amendment is back on the ballot as Amendment 3. The jaded among us take a lesson from that: voting doesn’t work. Look closer. Those wins were not undone because voting failed. They were undone because the other side is betting we will be too discouraged to defend them. Every vote we skip proves the bet right.
Third, it lets others rewrite the rules of the game itself. This ballot does not only ask what the laws should be. It asks who gets to make them. Proposition A asks whether to keep the congressional map lawmakers redrew in 2025. Amendment 6 asks whether the people’s power to pass laws by petition should be protected from a legislature that keeps overturning them. Those questions decide how much your vote will weigh in 2028 and beyond. Sit this one out, and you do not just lose a round. You let someone else set the terms of every round after.
Fourth, when you don’t vote, your silence becomes just another number. In the 2022 midterm, only about 40 percent of registered voters in St. Louis cast a ballot. About 126,000 people stayed home—that’s enough to fill Busch Stadium almost three times. Lawmakers in Jefferson City don’t see low turnout as anger. They see it as approval. It tells them they won’t be held accountable, so they don’t have to answer to us.
I understand the feeling that nothing changes. In two decades of organizing, I have felt it myself. But I have learned to separate two things we often confuse. The vote did not fail us. It was never meant to carry the whole load alone. Voting is the floor of our power, not the ceiling. It does not fix the pothole by itself. It decides who has to listen when we show up at City Hall about the pothole. It is the ground we stand on to organize, petition, protest, and demand. Take the floor away, and everything we build afterward has nothing to stand on.
But a foundation alone isn’t enough: we have to build on it. Election Day isn’t the end; it’s the beginning. Real change happens when regular people stay involved and don’t get comfortable. Stay alert. Go to Board of Aldermen, county council, and commission meetings, where important decisions at home. Go to Jefferson City and get in their faces. Or even better, run for office yourself. Encourage your pastor to speak out for the community, not just inside the church. Join civic groups, and if they lose their way, help them get back on track. Get your fraternity, sorority, or motorcycle club involved. Don’t give up. Make sure everything you’re part of, and everyone around you, steps up too.
The people who have always benefited from the current system know this better than we do. They never miss a midterm election. They don’t need you to agree with them—they just need you to stay home.
Our elders knew it too. They did not march, bleed, and organize for the ballot because they believed one election would save them. They did it because a people without the vote is a people without leverage. They voted through their disappointment, not after it was gone.
Scripture tells us not to grow weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. Weariness is real. Fainting is a choice.
So go ahead and feel frustrated. Be demanding. Hold every candidate and every issue on the ballot accountable. But do it as a voter, not as a bystander. If you stay silent, you’re still voting—you’re just letting someone else decide for you.
On November 3rd, make sure you cast your own vote.
Rev. Ra Shad Frazier-Gaines, MPA, is a movement strategist with two decades of civic organizing experience, author of “31 Days to Renew The Mind” & founder of the Black Caucus of the Young Democrats of America and Black Progressives.
Phone: 202.465.6289
