Letter: The importance of voting

My mother was raised by hand by a suffragette, and so it was impressed upon her that voting is a hard won right. I thought of her today after reading the story about Arizona "super voters" in the Arizona Daily Star (by Caitlin McGlade) reproduced from the Arizona Republic. "Call them super voters: about 2750 Arizonans have cast a ballot in every primary and general election for at least three decades"

And I thought about Beni Witbooi, my neighbor in Berkeley back in the early 1980s. I remember him paging through his daily issue of the Berkeley Gazette, a daily paper which gave an account of local politics. An election was coming up and I asked him whom he favored. He said: "I've never voted in my life."

He was South African, but not white: and this was back in apartheid days.

Point taken.

Voting is a hard-won right and not to be thrown away heedlessly but exercised judiciously.

John Leech