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While I tend not to get charged up about campaign barbs, let’s make one thing clear, if you didn’t vote at all, you don’t get to criticize others votes.

Blair Hull’s biggest scandal should be that he hasn’t vote regularly. While I’m uncomfortable with the language surrounding the divorce issues, ultimately we have no evidence of a pattern of behavior. I doubt any of us would want to be judged by our worst days.

However, voting matters a lot. I can forgive not voting in some cases, but even in voting for John Edwards in the primary, I remembered he only eratically voted before 1998. Hull has a similar record as does Cheney. Cheney really blows my mind, but frankly him not voting is a good thing.

Voting matters and it matters a lot. As I’ve mentioned before, voting was like a religion in my family and the only elections I have missed are when I’ve moved within the 30 days of an election and two special elections involving one office where I hated everyone. I’ve voted more at the age of 32 than either John Edwards in his forties or Blair Hull in his sixties. Hell, I probably voted more than both of them by the time I was 22.

A single vote isn’t that important. Despite the little booklets that trot out statistics about where one vote might have mattered, even in Florida one vote didn’t matter one way or another. Except on the Supreme Court.

That leaves open why I see voting as so essential. Voting is the simplest manner in which we participate in our freedom which is unmatched in the history of the world. To not vote is to reject the sacrifice of those before us and to take our freedom for granted.

This isn’t an issue of the far past. Forty years ago African-Americans fought for the right to vote and participate politically. The were not fully Americans. Registering and showing up just isn’t that hard for a nation as privileged as we are.

Thirteen years ago, I travelled to Nicaragua for a college class. Pretty cool for a kid raised in a trailer and apartments by a single mother. While many things struck me, the most moving were three different women who told their stories of being raped by Somoza’s National Guard or Contras for nothing more than promoting democratic reform. After those incidents, those women went on to continue their fight for democracy. One worked providing training to women that would enable them to hold jobs. Another was a legislator. How can we treat something so special so flippantly that people suffered for so greatly?

I don’t weed out candidates on this issue alone. Certainly honesty and ideology are vital and I can overlook that mistake. But why should I trust someone to represent me when they wouldn’t even represent themselves?