"Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least," the activist says. "The voting booth is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the most powerful."
It's an old and tired punchline: What if they held an election and nobody came?
But if the poll takers are right, that's the likely scenario this time around, with no sexy presidential, congressional or gubernatorial races to drive voters to the polls despite widespread angst over the direction in which state government is headed.
A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released last Tuesday offered the sorry statistic that three-quarters of New Jersey residents were completely in the dark that any elections are taking place this week.
At stake in the state's 2015 balloting are all 80 seats in the Assembly, the lower house of the state Legislature, as well as numerous freeholder, council and school board seats at the county and municipal levels.
Not since 1999 have Assembly candidates topped the ballot. Thirty-eight percent of the state's registered voters turned out that year; by all estimates, we'll be lucky to break double digits this time around.
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Civics professors and advocacy organizations as diverse as Rock the Vote and the American Legion knock their collective heads against the wall to entice citizens to the polling places.
They remind us that suffragist Susan B. Anthony was beaten and arrested in 1872 for having the audacity to try to vote. And that Freedom Fighters risked their lives - and some tragically lost those lives - fighting for the privilege of registering.
There's justifiable cause for cynicism when it comes to voting. We get that.
The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision regarding election spending by PACs and other interests made a mockery of the one-man-one-vote mandate; the justices followed that travesty up with a 2013 ruling essentially gutting the Voting Rights Act that had protected minority rights at the polls for half a century.
Still, enough challenges confront New Jersey residents that making your voice heard through the ballot box is less luxury than imperative.
Unemployment, rotting infrastructure, threats to the environment, the future of public education: These are problems whose solutions will be determined by the people you vote for today. Can you afford to sit it out and let somebody else decide who gets to make the laws?
One final thought as the day wears on and you haven't yet removed butt from sofa to go to the polls. It comes from Gloria Steinem.
"Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least," the activist says. "The voting booth is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the most powerful."