The Power of the Vote!

Voting season means many things, the most obvious being people telling you to vote and how important it is. But whenever I ask someone why I should vote, they always get flustered and can never give me a good answer. Now as a disclaimer, I am registered to vote and will be doing so when the day comes. However, I still think it’s important to question things and actually think about why we do them, and so that’s what I’m going to talk about in this blog post. I will try not to make this like an essay:

In our system, when it comes to the president, we usually vote btwn candidates, each of whom usually ends up getting about half of the popular vote. This is the choice we have, and it’s almost always competitive, thus giving meaning to our vote.

However, there are many aspects of our system which take away from this meaning. One is the electoral college, by which the popular vote is irrelevant, and instead each state is winner take all as well as unevenly represented. For example, based on elector to pop. ratio, a single voter in Wyoming has the weight of more than four voters in California. And Hawaii, because of their timezone, never really matters because the election is usually decided by the time their polling occurs. And The real meaty effect of the electoral college, though, is the winner take all part, as since most states lean in one direction in terms of the parties, you can be almost certain who will win there and therefore only a few states — the swing states — really decide the election, and this is where most of the campaigning occurs.

We do not live in a swing state. In New York, the last time a non-Democrat got our electors was 36 years ago, nine elections ago, and the Republican that year was the charismatic Reagan. And this definitely isn’t going to change with Trump, so what’s the point of voting when we already know who’s gonna win in our state? This is why electoral college is dumb: it disenfranchises the majority of the voters in the country.

These last years we’ve also come across another problem: who do we vote for if we don’t like either candidate? This is the question many people have asked themselves, and its root is in the two-party system we have. It has led to such a polarized gov’t and populous so that people aren’t even voting for who they like, but more-so they’re voting against those whom they hate.

I just realized I need to close this because it’s already way too long, so I will finally ask, what happens if you don’t vote? For one, you are taking for granted the freedom that we have in this country compared to probably the majority of the rest of the world, as we have fair elections. But then, if your vote doesn’t matter, isn’t this more of just a symbolic gesture? I don’t know, man. What I do know is that this is one of the most significant elections maybe ever, and that our country needs a lot of change, and with that I wish good luck to all, and will be posting something much less important and more fun next month. 🙂