If you seriously feel you cannot decide who to vote for president in this election (and you really should choose one), then DO still go to the polls to vote. There are more elections going on than the presidential one. Your state may have a governor's race going on. Or a Senate or House race on the state or federal level. But more importantly, you will have local county commissioners and city councilmen or what your area's name for them are. These local people determine how the money will be spent on schools and libraries and many other local issues that directly affect you. Your state officials will determine how much state money goes to your local municipalities and they handle such state issues as roads, health care to some degree, educational dollars, and pretty much anything you can think of. Your federal representatives will help form bills that will become laws across this nation that can change all our lives. Of course, it takes a long time to get anything changed in Washington. That's why it's important to vote for your local representatives who can effect immediate change to your lives.
And don't think that your vote does not count, because it does. In the past several presidential elections the vote was separated by only hundreds of thousands of votes. That's less than the population of New York City. It's about the size of a mid-size city like Atlanta, Charlotte, Reno, Tuscon, or Green Bay. That's a small amount compared to the vast number of people in the U.S. So go and vote. Your country desperately needs you right now and this is how you can help it. If you really want a better America or just want to see something have a possibility of getting done, then vote. It's the right thing to do. It's the American thing to do.
And for those curious Hilary Rodham Clinton is not the first woman to run for president. She is merely the first one to be placed on a ballot. The first woman to run for president was Victoria Woodhull a woman who arose from poverty to become, with her sister, the only woman to trade stocks on Wall Street under her company's name Woodhull, Claflin and Co. She had been an advocate for women's rights, including the right to vote, but in 1870 she did the unthinkable and announced her candidacy for president. She was derided not just by men, but also by women in the suffrage movement like Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Beecher Stowe who believed in getting the vote but not in "being men". During her two-year campaign to get on the ballot, she became the first woman to be allowed to address Congress and she argued that women had already been given the right to vote by the Constitution. She formed the Equal Rights Party made up of a disparate group of people who were looking for something new and fair. At the end of a speech at the delegation, she said "Let us have justice, though the heavens fall" to a roaring crowd. She, of course, did not win the election of 1872. Ulysses S. Grant did. Woodhull spent election day in jail. She once told reporters that "To be perfectly frank I hardly expected to be elected. The truth is I am too many years ahead of this age...and the enlightened mind of the average man...If my political campaign for the Presidency is not successful it will be educational."
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