Tue 29 Apr 2008
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Big Big Question is a Josh Millard project.
I vote in national elections.
I don’t always like either candidate, but I vote just so that “they” don’t think I don’t care and they can do whatever they want. Even though our ballots are secret, I want to be one more voice that does care what happens to our country.
That said, I usually don’t vote in local elections… I really hate politics. The message boards at my local paper’s website are a mess of “this article is slanted this way” and “this candidate parked their car wrong” and it gives me a huge headache.
I vote if I know enough about the candidates to make an informed vote, and if I have a strong opinion about the candidates. Very often I don’t meet both requirements.
Actually, I’ve never voted in a local election. Because…who cares? Government is way too big and the local whooseewhatsit isn’t going to make any discernible difference. There, I said it. Though that’s not actually what I believe. Some people should not be in office and I should vote against them. And some people are friends or relatives of friends and I should vote for them. And when the election is for higher-up locals, then it can make a difference.
If Obama ends up being a candidate, I probably won’t vote in the upcoming Presidential election because there is no way in hell Obama is going to lose here (Lake County, IL). I can’t make a difference either way. But if it’s Clinton, then I care, so I’ll vote.
Like IndigoRain, I feel I should vote just because I *do* have an opinion and a voice and I should use it so “they” don’t think I don’t care. Because I do care, when it matters. Often, I just don’t think that the election matters.
All that said, I acknowledge it would be best if everyone voted. That is, if everyone were genuinely informed and voted. The voting part is easy, though, while the homework isn’t always. (Well, my voting location is literally two doors down from my house so the voting part is easy for me.) :)
I vote every time I have the opportunity. I am the worst kind of voter out there, the uninformed moron just pullin’ levers. Here are my voting criteria:
1) Candidates with whom I agree on the issues
2) Candidates who belong to the political party that best reflects my own views
3) Candidates whose party affiliation is listed on the ballot as “socialist” or “communist” (doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. They never win, though.)
4) Candidates with the most ethnic-sounding name. After decades of representation by white guys, I’m ready to give Ms. Ramachandran a shot at the school board.
That’s me. A danger to the very idea of popular democracy.
I vote in every national/state election, and nearly all our local elections coincide with those, but I have missed a few “local only” elections just from not knowing about them.
Why do I vote? 1) for the same reason I willingly go to jury duty — it’s a privilege and a civic duty, dumb as it sounds; 2) to get “it’s not my fault” and “this weasel owes me better than this for my vote” bitching rights; 3) because it keeps me out of the poolhalls.
BitterOldPunk’s system sounds excellent — I do something similar with candidates for things like the University of Michigan Board of Trustees, which, inexplicably, everyone in Mich. (<–note old-style abbreviation) gets to vote for. Whoever sounds least WASPy or most subversive wins.
With maybe one or two exceptions, always, national, state, and local.
I do it partly out of gratitude to people who fought and marched and shouted and wrote in order to secure this opportunity for me. Partly because it’s cool to be part of a process, even if I’m a very tiny part of a very large process. And, at least for my local elections, because sometimes they’re settled by a very literal handful of votes, and I never want to look at the results and think, crap, I wish I’d gone to vote.
Finally, our polling stations are inevitably staffed by adorably sweet and slightly addled people whose average age is about 75, and it’s really fun to chat with them and have them explain the new electronic voting touch screens.
I’d like to add that my first vote ever, because I had finally reached voting age, was the presidential election in 2000. That was sooooo frustrating – my first vote and it took weeks to find out for certain who would be president!
I haven’t voted in years. I generally don’t discuss this, but as I dislike lying, I’m honest about it when someone asks me who I’m voting for. When I say I don’t vote, I’m usually cursed, yelled at or lectured. I don’t particularly like the scorn. Nor do I like upsetting people. So I always think about voting.
But I don’t because politics upsets me. It upsets me almost to the point where I can’t function. There’s a ton of childhood/family history around this, and I won’t go into it here, but basically I’m not a happy person if I engage in politics.
Voting itself wouldn’t upset me. But being an informed voter would. And, to me, if voting is a sin, voting without being informed is a greater one. So since I’m too selfish to forgo sinning altogether, I opt for the lessor sin.
I’ve had people tell me that an uninformed vote is better than no vote at all. I’m don’t understand that. When I ask why, I’m usually told things like “people died to give you the right to vote.” I respect that view, but I’m too pragmatic — too non-spiritual, too nuts-and-bolts — to be able to connect with that sort of argument. (I don’t believe that anyone’s life or death — including my own — serves a purpose.) If someone can convince me that uninformed voting will help the world right now, in some tangible way, I’ll maybe change my habits.
If someone wants to convince me to be informed, they’ll have an uphill battle. They’ll have to convince me to be unselfish to the point of destroying my own peace of mind. I do feel it’s important to serve the world in some way. Some of us serve in ways other than voting.
No offense, but the idea that “the local whooseewhatsit isn’t going to make any discernible difference” is really bullcrud.
I worked on a campaign to get my boss elected to the Cook County judiciary. She wasn’t the “slated” candidate and so fought an uphill battle. In a vote where there were tens of thousands of votes, she got in by about 54.
She is affecting a lot of people’s lives for the better.
Local politics is nowhere near as sexy or interesting as national politics, but they make even more of a “discernible difference” to your lives than the President and Congress do.
Mike Harris, I agree with you — at least where I live, which is New York City. I’ve seen presidents come and go, and they’ve made little apparent change to my middle-class existence. But life in the city has totally changed, several times, depending on who is mayor.
Not that this makes me vote, but I do agree with you.
I agreed about the US President having little impact on anything until GW and his havoc. I hope the office of President goes back to being relatively benign after he’s gone. (And I voted for him the first time, mind you.)
As for the local whoseewhatsits, this is a personal thing. I’m in one of those demographics that isn’t affected by much. White, upper middle class, single, no kids, don’t own my home. Life would be the about same for me no matter where I lived or who was running the city and state (and schools and planning committees, etc). As long as I can still drive on the roads in the town where I live, everybody’s doing a good job. I guess I’d be affected if the local gov’t limited the number of pets I could keep, so that’s a concern, but I’ve never seen that issue on the table in my area. The biggest thing I feel that comes from government is the pain of writing my income tax checks, and that has nothing to do with the local whoseewhatsits.
People in other demographics are affected much more by the goings-on of their local officeholders. (Social programs, issues related to schools, etc.) And national officeholders, for that matter. But the only stuff that goes on that I really care about has to do with the environment, taxes, and big stuff like that which is mainly changed at the national level.
Some mayors do huge things, like Mayor Daley shutting down airports at midnight, and making Chicago beautiful. If I lived within the city limits, I’d vote for him. The mayor of my suburb … couldn’t tell you what I’d be voting for or against.
So now you’re asking, “don’t you care about the people who *are* affected by their local government?” Of course I do. But this goes back to another thing I said in my first post: I don’t vote if I’m uninformed. If they maybe talked about something on the local news besides fires on the opposite side of the city, I might know something about what’s going on in politics. (That’s the easy, lazy, localnewshatr answer.) Or if I did my own research. But most people would agree that it’s easier to get involved in things that really affect you. I’m involved in a lot of my own stuff; researching candidates on the behalf of others would be extracurricular for me. I’d like to make it a part of my life some day, but just haven’t yet.
I skip the crap I know nothing about. If someone is running unopposed, I fill in my name.
I always vote, in almost every election, unless I forget or something important prevents me from doing it. I try to read up on the issues and candidates before I do, which is oftentimes a real pain in the ass to do, since California has an initiative process which basically lets anyone with a few million dollars put anything they want on the ballot (by paying people to collect signatures). The result is that there are often upwards of twenty initiatives to vote for, often about extremely complex budget matters that I frankly don’t feel qualified to weigh in on, and each is usually accompanied by a highly deceptive ad campaign of the “Proposition 321 will allow Mexican felons to steal your mother’s pain medication and put you out of work, paid for by Californians in favor of things that are good” variety.
On the plus side, I have found resources that I trust to give me the pros and cons of various issues, and recently I’ve been getting together with a few friends to go through the ballot collectively, which is fun because you get that getting homework done feeling and you get to find out new stuff about your friends.
About the local issues, in my locality that seems like the only place where I can have a practical, discernible voice in politics. CA is such a big state, and so predictable politically, that I really don’t feel my one vote makes a big difference in state or federal politics, but I do think that by voting and convincing my friends to vote the same way, I might have an effect on local matters such as city councilpersons.
I vote every time I can, local, state, or national. I look at it this way, if given a chance between Chinese or Mexican for dinner, I’d have an opinion, right? Then I should at least be able to formulate an opinion about who’s passing laws.
Plus a lot of people died or were injured just to give me this ability. The least I can do is haul my ass outta bed to pull a lever or push a button.
I have always voted in any german election (state, country, city) I have been eligible for but the most recent state election simply because I had been gone too long to know any of the candidates. I would have liked to vote in the california gubernatorial race (the recall one) but wasn’t eligible to, as I wasn’t with all the other US elections since I moved to the states in 2000. that always bugged me. I not relocated to london, where I was just told that I was in fact to vote in the mayoral elections based on my residency. I did not for I didn’t have an opinion on boris and ken. had I been here six months longer, I probably would have.
note being allowed to vote bugged me so much that I almost considered becoming a US citizen.
I always vote. I regard it as one of the responsibilities of being Canadian, like paying my taxes. I try to decide which candidates are most likely to do a good job of protecting the general interest.
One thing I noticed while I was living in Colorado a few years ago is that voting is simpler in Canada than it is in the US. The election forms I saw in Colorado were enormously complex compared to the ones here; there were many more offices to be filled by voting, and many more candidates, plus a number of complex referendum questions.
I am here in the land of compulsory voting (or compulsory getting your name crossed off the list, if you prefer). The idealistic me likes to think that compulsory voting combats voter apathy. At least everyone has to make a decision, even if that decision is to draw cartoon genitalia on the ballot paper before folding it into a flying origami rhinoceros.
It hurts my brain when people claim that compulsory voting is taking away their freedom to choose not to vote. Ok, sure, you have a right to refuse to make a choice.
Of course, even with compulsory voting, you don’t HAVE to vote; you won’t be put to death or anything. You can stay in bed all day on election day and make a donation to the government instead, in the form of a fine if that’s your choice.
goshling, if I told you that you could live in a country with freedom of religion, would you feel that I’d aptly described it if, in this country, you didn’t HAVE to go to church — you could stay home and pay a fine instead?
I just don’t understand stuff like this: “at least everyone has to make a decision.” Why is that a good thing? How is it useful for people to make decisions, if those decisions are completely uninformed (I do understand the utility of informed decisions).
Maybe it’s a question of values. I don’t value Democracy, other than as a means to an end. For me, it’s not a goal, it’s a tactic towards achieving a goal — or rather many goals. My goals include a society in which people are happy and healthy, in which they nurture the land rather than destroy it. As I see it, Democracy is a deeply flawed system that is never-the-less the most likely one we’ve so far come up with which will possibly work to attain my goals.
But it only works (as I’m describing) if people study before voting. If they’re not willing to do that, they’re a liability at the ballot.
I guess if I valued Democracy for its own sake, I might feel like you.
If you showed me a better system for achieving my goals, I’d jettison Democracy in a heartbeat.
Grumblebee, no, I don’t think your religion analogy is apt.
I didn’t agree with compulsory voting until I saw the BNP win a by-election at Tower Hamlets in London in the early 1993, and that scared the crap out of me.
I hope that those of us who vote, whether compulsory or not, do indeed make informed decisions. I might think that someone else’s informed decision is incorrect, or not informed enough, but I have a glimmer of hope that the bulk of the population will at least have an idea of the values of the party that gets their tick.
I too have a desire for society to be happy, healthy, etc. To that extent, I think all members of society should maintain at least a passing interest in those who wield some form of authority, lest society finds itself living with the BNP or an equivalent.
This BBC article says:
The party’s (BNP’s) Derek Beacon won a 1993 by-election in the Millwall ward of Tower Hamlets but in the full borough elections the following May Labour won it back – on an extraordinarily high turnout, for a local election, of 66.5%.
Beacon should probably never have won that by-election in the first place, and the fact that he then soon lost the seat indicates to me that the electorate didn’t want him and he only won the seat because he had a small but passionate following and not enough people bothered to register an opposing view.
I guess I’m assuming/hoping that most of the people who don’t bother voting are pretty conservative (in the middle of the road sense) and would act as a balance to keep extremists at either end of the scale from having too much power.
Grumblebee, no, I don’t think your religion analogy is apt.
Fair enough. Care to explain?
I hope that those of us who vote, whether compulsory or not, do indeed make informed decisions.
And I hope that advertisers will always be honest and that it will never rain while I’m on vacation. Alas, hoping doesn’t make it so.
I think all members of society should maintain at least a passing interest in those who wield some form of authority
I guess the main difference between you and me is that you think FORCING is likely to make people become interested. My experience has been the exact opposite. In most cases I’ve seen, people resent what they get forced to do. Forced people put in as little effort as possible.
For instance, forcing kids to read Shakespeare in school has turned a lot of people off to beautiful poetry.