Today the whole country practices followership out loud.
I have voted for as long as I can remember, so by the time I was stationed at Bitburg Air Base in Germany from 1992 to 1994 and RAF Lakenheath in England from 1994 to 1996, marking a ballot was nothing new. Mailing one home from overseas was. I was a Captain, thousands of miles from home, in uniform, and it taught me that no matter where I was on voting day, my vote still mattered.
Tomorrow is Election Day, and it carries a truth nobody puts on a yard sign. Election Day is the one day a year the entire country practices followership out loud. We spend the other 364 days arguing about leaders: who has it, who lost it, who deserves it next. Tomorrow the leaders go quiet. They have made their case, and now they wait, because the only thing that matters tomorrow is what the followers decide to do with it. The follower holds the pen.
A vote is not a leader's act. It is a follower's act, and it is the most consequential one there is. You choose whom to align with, and you put your name on that choice, which makes a ballot the follower's signature. Notice what the ballot does not ask. It does not ask whether you agree with everything that person has ever said or done; it asks whether you will stand with them. Alignment is not agreement. Every follower who has ever worked for a boss knows the difference, and the mature ones know that aligning with your eyes open beats sitting it out with a grudge every single time.
John Maxwell said that the person who thinks he leads but has no followers is only taking a walk. Tomorrow you decide who takes a walk and who takes office, and that is a staggering amount of power to hand to ordinary people. It is also exactly where power belongs, which makes it all the more remarkable how many people leave it on the table. In the last three midterms, turnout among eligible voters ran 37 percent in 2014, 50 percent in 2018, and 47 percent in 2022, which means that on a typical midterm Election Day roughly half the country never picks up the pen. Leaders get the title; followers give it meaning. Every elected official in this country serves at the signature of people who will never hold a press conference, and the system is built on the conviction that those people can be trusted with the pen. Prove it right.
The signature also obligates, and this is where most people get followership backward. They treat the vote as the finish line when it is the starting line. A signature means you own what comes next, so what you do on November 3 is the followership that actually builds anything. Hold the standard whether your candidate won or lost. Take your disagreements up and sideways, to the people who can do something about them, instead of down to the people who can only absorb them. Pray for whoever ends up in authority, because Scripture tells us to do that for kings and all who govern, and it does not add a clause about whether we voted for them. Then get back to the work in front of you, because leadership is local long before it is national, and the country runs on people who show up the morning after.
So thank you in advance for voting. Whichever way you mark it, you are doing the thing that makes every other thing possible, and you are doing it as a follower, which is the most honorable seat in the house. Sign it. Own it. Then go follow well.
