After an exhausting, bruising election season — the day is here at last.

Regardless of whether you consider yourself left, right or middle, the time has come to wield the ultimate power afforded to you, the voter, under our system of government: the power of your vote.

Every year, there are stories of races decided by a handful of electors. America has been closely divided for some time, and that means that, on average, your vote matters more than it would otherwise if you live in a swing state.

There are reasons campaigns dedicate resources and energy bringing in extra help from neighboring “safe” states during major elections — Democrats in California, for example, frequently feel as though their vote is meaningless since California has been reliably blue for longer than some of us have been alive. So, they’ll go canvas in Nevada, which is a swing state.

Due to the electoral college, swing state voters tend to have an outsized impact on a national result.

Pennsylvania, as most of us are (painfully, at this point) aware, is possibly the swing state this year. We have seen an enormous amount of effort from both Republicans and Democrats to sway voters here.

Thusfar, public-facing data has showed this presidential election to be close.

Like, possibly 2000 close, not even 2020 close.

The campaigns obviously have more data with their internal polling, and the actions the campaigns have taken paints a slightly different picture — Trump spending a lot of time on North Carolina in the final days, for example — but with the data that we of the public have to work with, the election appears to hang on a knife’s edge.

This is not an election to sit out.

It can be hard to feel like anything you do matters politically, especially if you aren’t involved in your county’s party. One vote, after all, only has so much weight in a state with over nine million registered voters.

And yet, time and again, elections come down to the wire, with all the attending drama and angst.

History says your vote matters, regardless of how it might feel sometimes.

Consider what the Republican party has been able to accomplish over the last few decades — politics is a game of inches, but those inches eventually add up. It feels like nothing is happening and your elected officials are ignoring you — but then the Supreme Court gets flipped and decisions like Roe v. Wade and Chevron are overtuned.

Like it or not, these changes happened in no small part due to the efforts of voters downstream, showing up consistently year after year.

And, if nothing else, voting is the ultimate bragging right — whether you like what happens or not, regardless of the outcome, you can rest easy knowing that you took the action afforded to you under the Constitution. Ask Democrats who sat out in 2016 how they felt afterwards.

You may feel it is too late to develop an informed stance on the various candidates, be it for State Rep., US Senator or President/Vice President. However, in the age of the internet, that information has been collected and is freely available at your fingertips. There is still time to find reputable, nonpartisan sources to research the candidates.

If none of this has persuaded you to cast your ballot, consider this: in the 2020 presidential election, Pennsylvania had a voter registration of 9,090,962. Of that population, 6,915,283 cast their votes — a difference of 2,175,679.

Of those who cast their votes, Biden carried the state with 3,458,229 vs Trump’s 3,377,674 — a difference of 80,555.

2,175,679 could have voted and didn’t.

Don’t let the opportunity to have a say in our future slip by.

Do the thing.

Vote.