"I was watching a television program before, with a kind of roving moderator who spoke to a seated panel of young women who were having some sort of problem with their boyfriends - apparently, because the boyfriends had all slept with the girlfriends' mothers. And they brought the boyfriends out, and they fought, right there on television. Toby, tell me: these people don't vote, do they?"
-Martin Sheen as President Bartlet on The West Wing
I happen to have a very strong opinion on uninformed voting: it shouldn't happen. I suppose that it's understandable when someone is uninformed and votes in a country where stable communication methods aren't available, but in the US in particular, what excuse is there? Just thinking about the number of ways people have access to free news here is astounding; network news, radio news, the newspaper at your local library, the internet at your local library, those campaign pamphlets that volunteers really, really want you to read about their candidate. If a person can't be bothered to take advantage of the resources being presented to them, they shouldn't take advantage of their right to vote, either.
Voting while uninformed causes people to make superficial judgements about candidates based only on assumptions. What if you walk into the voting booth really determined to vote pro-life? Sure, it's a safe enough bet that voting Republican will mean voting pro-life, but there are pro-choice Republicans and Pro-life Democrats out there. You'd be doing yourself a disservice and actually increasing the influence of people that disagree with you by voting uninformed.
It's just as bad to vote based on the mindless ranting on either side of an election or to vote based on something that has nothing to do with politics. I wish the people that voted for Obama because he's black, or voted for McCain because Obama's a fascist socialist [yes, it confuses me too, but I've actually heard someone try to use that as a legitimate argument in a discussion] had just stayed home on election day.
Alyssa, I strongly agree with you. If you don't know whats going on the political battlefield during elections then don't vote. A lot of these people who don't care and/or don't educate themselves have the excuse of "well so what if I didn't vote it's not like my vote would make a difference" or " so what if I don't know whats going it's not like it made a difference". If all these people would somewhat educate themselves then who knows what our government would look like.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't the process of voting involve a level of some political involvement?
ReplyDeleteIsn't there some level of awareness that exists that causes someone to vote for someone for whatever reason?
Even if it's uninformed and their political ideologies are literally: "I dun liek da Irak wahr s0 i v0t3 demohcratzz", there's a micro-level of political awareness.
I'm probably going to expand upon this in my blogpost, but aren't there benefits to at least even taking the initiative to vote, regardless of your political awareness?
I think that you raise one of the critical issues surrounding voting and election days in the United States, who’s voting and why? When you look at demographics for voter turn out, the majority of people who are voting are middle to upper class, educated white people. Why is this? Why aren’t more people voting in as big of a group as these people? Perhaps the real issue that needs to be examined is less about educating people on their candidate choices, I agree with Toby that even the slightest knowledge about what’s going on politically is enough, but more about making it easier for people to vote. The United States does not hold their elections on the weekend and we don’t make Election Day a holiday. This, in and of itself, drastically decreases the number of people who will vote, they simply don’t have the time. It takes time to vote, especially if you’re relying on public transportation to get you to a polling station and the polls don’t stay open very long. Also, in certain areas, polling stations are concentrated in higher income areas making it exponentially more difficult for low-income individuals to vote. It’s issues like this that I feel need to be addressed before we can tackle the issue of promoting a more educated voting community; people must actually be able to vote easily first.
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