I've just been reading the NUS Voter Registration Pack and it's really got me thinking about the low turnout in the recent local and general elections. I was lucky enough to be 18 in time for 1997 election, and going to the polling station on May 1st was a wonderful experience - waiting my turn to go into the polling booth made me feel so important and grown-up, though I don't think the enormity of what I was doing hit me at the time. It's only now, looking back, that I realise what a historic day that was. No, not because I, Jo Salmon, used my right to vote in a free election, but because that was the day that the country turned out en masse to reject the incumbent government and created a landslide victory for a party they had rejected for 18 years.

This post isn't about the good or the bad things that New Labour have done since 1997, but about the power that voters hold. Every individual vote does count and every individual voter can make the difference. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves. Look at the second reading of the Higher Education Bill earlier this year. If just five MPs had voted differently, the future for students would be very different indeed... Now who is saying that one vote doesn't count?

And if a sense of civic duty doesn't motivate people to vote; if a desire to input into the democratic structures of our country isn't what gets people to put a simple X next to someone's name, then how about a guilt trip? 2004 is the tenth anniversary of the first free election in South Africa, that amazing day when Nelson Mandela voted for the first time in his life and won a victory that had most of the world in tears. The pictures and media coverage of black South Africans queuing for hours to exercise their right to vote was a moving sight - and all the more poignant because there was a diverse mix of people from all walks of life, of all ages, waiting patiently to do something they had been waiting their entire lives to do.

For the elections in South Africa this year, the experience was repeated. Despite arrogant claims in the Western media that apathy was going to keep South Africans at home, once again they queued for hours, and the footage and interviews were as every bit moving in 2004 as they were in 1994. I saw so many interviews of young people talking about their memories of the end of apartheid, and how excited they had been in the run up to the elections; and heartbreaking interviews with older people, not just Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, but ordinary black South Africans who, despite the fact that they were in their 70s and 80s, were only legally voting for third time in their lives.

How can that not be an inspiration to everyone in the UK who takes their votes for granted, who can't be bothered to turn out to vote, who naively believes that democracy is a right and that sitting at home is the best way to influence change. If we have learnt anything from A Long Walk to Freedom it is the story of democracy, and how something is not a right unless it is extended to every person in the world. It only becomes a right when everyone has access to it. Otherwise, it's nothing more than a privilege, and privileges can be taken away.

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