Why is voting so hard?
I spent most evenings last week filling out my ballot and I still am not done! There is the president, the governor, congressional seats, state legislature seats, other state government offices, county government, city government, judges, and 7 state constitutional amendments!!! That is SO much stuff!
And everything has to be investigated. Are any of the 3rd party candidates for president a good option? How about the governor's race? I literally went through a side by side comparison and their websites and gave them points if I agreed with them on the issues. At the end, it was a tie. Then another race, absolutely none of the candidates are great options. What is an assessor? How do I know what the most pressing issues are in the assessor's office are? Can I just evaluate them like I would if I were hiring a candidate for a job? And how do I know if a judge should be retained or not? They all get reviewed, and none of them have less than a B- review. So, they all pass, right?
The constitutional amendments are actually the easiest ones to decide because there is a nice little website where they have put up the pros, the cons, the rebuttal for the pros, and the rebuttal for the cons. It's a bit of reading, but at least all the info I need is right there in one place. And not angry yelling.
Either way, none of my past education really prepared me for how hard voting is. How important? Yes. How it works in the US, with the electoral college, blah blah, blah? Yep, we did that. But how much work it is to vote? Nope. They didn't cover that. But maybe it's better to not know that voting is essentially the GRE* of citizenship.
The good news, though, is that if you vote, you can't fail! You have done your part for democracy! Assignment completed, you pass! So, yay for voting. Give it a try! And when you are done, treat yourself to some ice cream, because you will definitely deserve it!
*Or LSAT, MSAT, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment