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We don’t need waving flags, loud rallies or fireworks this election season. What we need is quieter and harder: clear heads, steady hearts and our full attention on the strongest tool a democracy gives its citizens, the vote.

If your ballot is sitting on the kitchen counter, don’t let good intentions go stale. Fill it out and turn it in. If you haven’t voted yet, the usual excuses will come up. The ballot is complicated. The polling place is far. The lines are long. You’re not sure your registration is current. All of these are real, and none of them is a good enough reason to stay home. Check your registration, make a plan and vote. It is both a civic duty and a cherished privilege.

That privilege was not handed to us. When the Constitution was written, most Americans could not vote. Women, poor people and people of color were left out. Over generations, they organized, marched, petitioned, went to court and sometimes died to win the right that many of us now treat as routine. Allies of conscience stood with them.

Today, election officials and poll workers keep that right working, often for little pay and lately under real threat. We are what those earlier generations hoped for. We owe them a debt of participation, and we repay it by showing up. Every ballot we cast honors their sacrifice and carries their unfinished work forward.

The fight is not over. It is wrong to block eligible voters so that a minority can keep power. It is wrong to allow fraud and tampering with how votes are cast and counted. It is wrong to intimidate anyone with a legal right to vote. And it is wrong to allow the spending of private fortunes to throw out lawful votes.

Those efforts should fail. They fail when citizens refuse to be turned away, and when judges and public servants are willing to stand up for what is just. A right that no one defends can be lost slowly and quietly, one rule and one closed polling place at a time.

Every tradition of wisdom warns about leaders who think power belongs to them by birthright. In a democracy, power is borrowed. It belongs to the people, and the people lend it out one election at a time. Leadership is a trust we grant, not a throne anyone inherits.

So we push back against the cynicism that says your vote doesn’t count. We push back against the apathy that treats elections as background noise. And we push back against the idea that sitting out is a meaningful protest. Staying home is not a statement. It is a tantrum without the sustained follow-through needed to make things better.

None of us votes from a place of perfection. No candidate on the ballot is flawless, and no voter is either. That is a reason for humility and careful thought, not for walking away. Read about the candidates and the measures. Look past the slogans. Ask what is true and what is spin. Talk with people you trust, and with some you disagree with.

When the votes are counted, the work will not be finished. Campaigns leave wounds and those wounds need healing. Winners will need humility, and those who lose will need a reason to stay engaged. Our communities will need coalitions of compassion: neighbors willing to work across differences for the common good and for a fairer deal for everyone, especially people who have lived longest in the shadow of injustice.

We vote in hope. Some may call it naive, even absurd, but it has carried this country through its darkest hours. It is the hope that love is stronger than death, that justice can still roll down like waters, that we may yet see goodness in the land of the living and that our small, ink-stained choices can be the seeds of something better. Hope that votes is hope that works.

Fill out your ballot. Turn it in. Bring a neighbor. Then stay involved after Election Day.

The Rev. Floyd Thompkins, of Novato, is pastor of Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church in Marin City.