Last year, New York City made a critical mistake in elections that impacted the New York primaries. A list of 117,000 active voters were purged from the poll books and were unable to vote for the candidates presented by their party. This issue was mostly uncontroversial in that everyone agreed that voting should be better regulated by the government for such grandiose errors. As it is, New York City has the longest time for people to register for primaries. Yet some people argued that it was still not long enough. In the most recent election, Bernie Sanders’ political campaign only started gaining more traction after New York had closed its registration time for the primaries. But registration cannot be open too close to election day otherwise the government will not have enough time to monitor for voter fraud. 

Voter fraud seemed like less of an issue in our class than voter turnout. People were both encouraging and discouraging the  entire populace voting in elections. On one hand there is only a small portion of the population voting and changing the course of history for the vast majority. There is a fear of people voting under the pressure of larger groups’ influence. In terms of the primaries, the voters are only those registered with a party, encouraging voters to think along party lines instead of individual issues. The primaries exclude independents who make up a significant portion of the population and whose less party-oriented voices deserve to be heard. 

On the other hand, there was also a fear of uneducated voters making uninformed choices. As college students taking classes where we actively discuss global and domestic problems and solutions and critically analyze the policies in place, we can consider ourselves suitably well-informed – at least enough to vote. Constitutionally, the definition of an eligible voter is left to the states. There is no requirement to be politically active or even politically aware, and we noted that in foreign elections the results are sometimes rigged. But is a popular vote truly democratic if we don’t push for everyone to vote? The Electoral College, after all, is in place to prevent the populace from electing a dangerous person to power. If we have a check in our electoral system, isn’t it appropriate that everyone should vote?