Lately I have been hearing about voting
for the lesser of two of evils. “I’ll never vote for Hillary because of her
dishonesty”. “I’ll never vote for Trump because he has no experience”. It’s
something new every day about Clinton and Trump. If it is not about tax returns
it is about emails or something else. In 2000 I became very interested in the
voting process because of my mom. Bill Clinton was leaving the oval office and
everything was “prosperous” as she says. When it came to voting between democrats
and republicans she made it sound like minorities voted for democrat because of
some odd reason (I really never understood why). In my fourth grade class, we
had a mock voting to see which president would win and to understand the voting
the process. The majority of students picked George W. Bush. Mrs. Vaniwagon
said it was because we were old enough our vote could change the outcome of the
election. With that logic it’s telling a bunch of nine year olds we can make a
difference in our country. I am not knocking her down for trying to cement that
into our heads but I really never believed that I could be the deciding vote
for who will become the president. Did anyone really feel they would had been
able to change the voting outcome?
Let’s say
my interest level was pretty high when George W. Bush was re-elected for his
second term in 2004. I was really hoping for John Kerry just because I wanted
to see a change. My eighth grade History teacher, Mr. Cowell, hosted a
political party on election night in 2004 for all of his students. He had every
T.V. in the school’s cafeteria locked on a different news channel reporting the
results. It was disappointing to see Bush re-elected for a second term that night.
I cannot remember if 2004 was the year where votes had to be recounted but it
was not even a close race. Your vote, your voice would not even had matter in
this race. I remember Mr. Cowell telling a group of students our vote would had
matter if it was a closer a race. Back then I was starting to wrap my head around
what electoral votes meant for each party. And what that meant for the phrase
our vote counts.
image source: https://onsizzle.com/i/its-not-the-lesser-of-two-evils-its-a-know-2092540
