One good reason to vote – regardless of who or what you’re voting for – is that many Republican governors and legislatures  across the country have been working tirelessly to create barriers to the ballot. Much of this is done under the guise of preventing voter fraud, but the argument doesn’t pass inspection. In Texas, where under current laws citizens can vote using a gun permit but not a student ID, as many as 600,000 people may not be able to vote. Texas’s strict voting regulation is being pushed despite there being only 2 cases of voter fraud out of 20 million votes cast statewide in the past decade. Many politicians have come right out and said what the voter ID laws are about: narrowing the voting pool. For example, Chris Christie said that the GOP needed to win gubernatorial races so that they were the ones controlling the “voting mechanisms” going into 2016. This is because the stricter voting regulations have a disproportionate impact on minority voters.

Still think your vote doesn’t matter?