Thread by @AliVelshi

1/15
Voting is personal for me. I grew up in Canada, a country to which my family and I immigrated. I’ve joked that unlike Barack Obama, I actually AM a Kenyan-born Muslim. But that’s not the whole story—and the whole story shows why voting matters so much to me. #velshi

2/15
In 1981, 10 years after my family arrived in Canada, and having just recently become citizens, my father ran for office. I was 11 at the time, and maybe the hardest working campaign volunteer he had. #velshi

3/15
Late on election day, when all was done but the counting, my dad and I drove home to get ready for the big night. He was going to make history, becoming the first person of South Asian descent to be elected to any major office in Canada. #velshi

4/15
We got back into the car to drive to the campaign headquarters. We turned the radio on. At 8pm, the election broadcast started. Results would take a while, except for one constituency in which the outcome was so obvious they could declare a winner. #velshi

5/15
That race was my dad’s. We had lost the election. Before we even reached the campaign headquarters. It was over, and I was devastated. But my father wasn’t. “Of course we lost,” he told me. “We were never going to win.” #velshi

6/15
I asked my dad what it was all for if he knew he was going to lose. He said he ran because he could. His candidacy gave voters a choice—a choice he wasn’t able to make as a young man. #velshi

7/15
Unlike me, my parents were born and grew up in South Africa, where my father, and his father, and his father before him fought the injustice of the racist apartheid regime from the wrong side of the law. #velshi

8/15
Because of the color of their skin—of my skin—my forefathers could never run for election. They couldn’t even vote. Or own land. Or freely express ideas or opinions that differed from the government without risk of being thrown in jail or even killed. #velshi

9/15
My father saw his candidacy as a choice for voters. What they decided was up to them. That choice—that vote—is democracy itself. #velshi

10/15
Your right to vote was hard earned, in blood and in jail time, from the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, to the Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights movement. And yet, in America, only about 55% of eligible voters actually vote. #velshi

11/15
In Australia, voter turnout is above 90%. But voting is much simpler there. Australians can vote at any polling station… IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. Voting is actually compulsory in Australia. If you don’t do it, you get fined. #velshi

12/15
In Canada—like in most other developed countries—there is a national standard for voting applied across the board. Eligible citizens are automatically registered to vote, and unless someone produces evidence to the contrary at your polling station, you get to vote. #velshi

13/15
America, which boasts of being the world’s free-est and fairest democracy, has managed—and some of it is deliberate—to complicate the fundamental underpinning of our democracy in a way that has become a form of voter suppression in and of itself. #velshi

14/15
But it doesn’t have to be this way. My dad ran for office because the system couldn’t stop people from making a choice to support the ideas he championed. And they couldn’t stop him, and they can’t stop you. You have ten days left to BE democracy in action. #velshi

15/15
By the way, my dad ran again in 1987. That time the voters chose him. Like I said: voting is personal for me. #velshi