Want to know the most important thing in politics? It's voting

What's the most basic thing about elections?

Voting.

I live in Sun City Peachtree, an active-adult community just outside the Atlanta metropolitan area. We're in the northern part of Spaulding County, which was a population of about 64,000.

We have a County Commission, and one of the residents from our community ran for one of the five seats.

He campaigned hard within our community and did an extraordinary job of getting out the vote.

In the May primary, he was the leader of the three main candidates but came up short of the 50 percent needed for the Republican nomination. The way things work in Georgia, that put the top two finishers into a runoff in late July.

Our guy won, with roughly two-thirds of the vote. There are no Democrats in the county -- at least not enough to matter -- so he will be unopposed in the

Two weeks or so later, a couple of county residents wrote letters to the local newspaper, the Griffin Daily News, to express their displeasure.

"Looks to me like Sun City rules, no matter what."

It's easy to understand the fear. Spaulding County is economically depressed, and Sun City is a planned community of new houses that will only get larger. As of 2014, there are between 750-800 homes occupied. The plan is that within 12 to 15 years there will be 3,500 homes.

When that time comes, Sun City will be a big dog, and one thing that will bother locals is that many of its residents will be from outside Georgia and even the South. What they don't know is that they will change us as much or more as we will change them.

One immediate difference, though, is that we vote in large numbers. A summer runoff usually draws extremely low numbers, even with a runoff to determine the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat. Countywide, just 5,055 voters went to the polls in the runoff in 21 precincts. But in the Sun City precinct, there were 986 eligible voters and 840 of them cast ballots.

That's an 82 percent turnout.

Woody Allen said it best when he said that 80 percent of life is just showing up.

That's even more true in politics, where folks who show up and get others to do the same have more influence than anyone other than maybe the mega-donors.

Not everyone can donate millions.

But everyone can show up.