Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Your Vote Counts

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

2 comments:

  1. The lesser of two evils for this election could not be anymore spot on. I know many people who are refusing to vote because they feel this way. However, I plan to vote and I do feel that my vote matters. Informing people on why to vote is important and a great topic.

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  2. I took AP Government my sophomore year of high school (around the 2008 elections), and became very interested in voting. When I turned 18 however, I completely lost that drive to vote. A saw a man who yeah may have been the most qualified at that time win because of the color of his skin. I understand my vote matters, but I will not vote for someone based off of their gender, race, ethnicity, wealth, status, etc. It should be about their policies, staff, and competence as a leader and just simply that.

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