Leadership Quote by DeForest Soaries

“Foundational act” is doing double duty here: it’s civics-class clarity with campaign-season urgency. DeForest Soaries frames voting not as one political option among many, but as the keystone behavior that turns democracy from a slogan into an operating system. The verb choice matters. Voting “breathes life” suggests the principle of consent isn’t self-sustaining; it can sit inert, like a constitutional phrase carved into stone, unless citizens animate it with participation. That’s a subtle rebuke to the idea that legitimacy is automatic once institutions exist.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences. For citizens, it moralizes abstention without scolding outright: if consent is the basis of government, not voting reads like withholding oxygen and then complaining about the air quality. For officials and parties, it’s a reminder that authority is borrowed, not owned. “Consent of the governed” is Lockean and American in its pedigree, and Soaries taps that lineage to make a contemporary argument feel timeless.

Context matters because Soaries has been a voting-rights advocate, notably as chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in the post-2000 era when ballot design, access, and trust in election administration became national flashpoints. In that climate, the line works as both inspiration and pressure: it elevates voting into civic sacrament while quietly implying that barriers to voting are barriers to legitimacy itself. It’s a politician’s sentence with a pastor’s cadence, calibrated to make participation feel less like a preference and more like a duty.