With the election coming up this fall, I have often found myself contemplating whether or not to invest my time and energy into actually voting. This contemplation is mostly due to the fact that voting in a national election seems border line senseless to me.
The idea behind the election makes perfect sense: two candidates contending to run the nation, Americans choosing the “winner” after countless campaigning and public debates. The actual voting process is what has me amused.
Americans are bombarded relentlessly with the “your vote counts” slogan. We hear it all the time as a response to thinking our vote doesn’t matter: “What if everyone thought that way…” Well, I get it – votes supposedly count in the election process. My problem is the idea that the voting process is accurate or even worthwhile, both conclusions due to voting machines and the electoral college.
First of all, why do we live in a society where machines have to do everything for us? The idea of a machine – that is incredibly prone to flaws – counting the votes for something as vital as the leader of our nation is absurd. A machine can easily be tampered with to control the results of its unsuspecting voter without detection. The concept of human counting may be daunting and time consuming, and perhaps even full of flaws itself, but it’s easier for me to trust a human than a machine. Given, human error and perhaps even corruption lurks, but humans are a lot cheaper than machines and I believe them to be much more dependable and accurate.
Secondly, why do we need an electoral college to decide what
4 comments:
The idea that people are less expensive, less prone to flaws and in general more dependable and accurate is indeed “senseless.” People are the sole source of the corruptions you mention. Voting machines are not self-aware, they do not decide that they like one candidate over another and change the vote, that is all done by a person, most likely several. Machines are programmed to tally without error exactly what they are told. The actuality is people cost money; it takes many, many people to count votes and man the polls. Can you imagine what a colossal undertaking it would be to count 122 million ballots? On the contrary people are less likely to be more accurate in counting. Sometimes this is do to depravity other times do to just plain human error.
The Electoral College was put in place for just the reason that you querulously refer. The reasoning behind the Electoral College is not to quash the voice of the public, but to avoid chaos. Few voices are easily heard but when you have many a single utterance will be lost. While an elector can vote for a candidate contrary to the public’s wishes, doing so would have almost no impact on the results of said vote, not to mention he/she would not likely remain in their position very long.
Maybe you’re right; your vote won’t make a difference, with certainty, if you’re the only person who chooses not to vote. What happens when a hundred or a million people opt out of an election? Many do and with as many reasons that I could not begin to count. Charles de Montesquieu once said that “The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.” I understand where you’re coming from, it’s easy to feel like your opinion is insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but if you let yourself believe for a moment that being impassive is the higher road, you are quite mistaken. Fore it will not be long that the majority is unspoken and the minority will rule. Take some time, think things through a bit more and ask yourself…”Is this what I truly believe?”
Though you haven't completely given up on the idea of voting, your arguments are drawing you further and further away from actually getting up and going through the process in the fall! Voting is definitely worth both your time and energy because ultimately your vote does count in choosing the next leader of our nation. If everyone feels like they don't need to be going out to vote because it's senseless, then the elections might turn into a process where the minority wins, instead of the well-liked majority winning.
I do understand your argument that the society is turning into one that is machine-driven, and it makes it seem like the people are the lazy, but could you imagine trying to find enough individuals to go through millions of ballots by hand? This would take such a large amount of time that the voting process would have to start even sooner. It takes roughly a day to tally votes, and that is through the process of speedy machines, if we used people, there is no telling what type of problems might arise! Even careless mistakes such as misreading a bubble, or skipping over a ballot could cause such a huge, dramatic issue. You say that it's harder to depend on a machine rather than a human, but machines are simply programmed to do what the human tells it to do and ONLY what the human tells it to do, so if they make a mistake, the human should be the one to blame. Also, though voting machines are expensive, if we used human labor, this would also cost a large sum of money because there would have to be a large amount of people helping count votes, demanding a reasonable salary. Overall, I believe that the machines susceptibility to flaws is just as great as humans'. In fact, I think that the machines are less susceptible simply because they've been reliable in the past, and if we switched over, chaos is very likely to be a result.
I completely agree with your arguments about the electoral college. Is an electoral college even necessary in the first place if the voting is already such a lengthy process that involves the nation's majority vote, instead of the ultimate decision of a different group of people? America tries hard to get everyone involved in voting because 'your vote counts', yet they give a committee the right to ultimately decide whom the winner should be. We might as well turn over all the major decisions to the electoral college if they have the power to choose the leader of our nation. The government should really listen to peoples' opinions of the electoral college because I think there are a lot of unhappy Americans.
Ultimately, the voting process is important, and you should take the time and energy to embark in it. I know that counting machines and the electoral college are putting a damper on your spirits, but it's worth it to be a part of the population who helped decide who the next leader of our nation will be.
It is easy to fall victim to the idea that your vote amongst the millions of other votes in the country does not account for much, but this idea is exactly what our election process is designed to prevent. What if a large portion of the population felt the same way you did and decided that their vote wasn’t worth casting. The opinion of that group would then be left unheard.
The voting process has even changed over the centuries to make it more convenient and accessible to the American public. It is even less of a burden today than it was years ago, giving you less reason to not participate on election day.
In this argument, the author supported the use of manual counting of the popular votes, however, is this idea really plausible? The time and efficiency of hand counting the votes offers more room for error than using voting machines. Though susceptible to error as well, the voting machines are unbiased and contain the ability to count more efficiently and accurately. With such great numbers of votes to count, a machine has the resistance of getting tired as people would. If the situation arises, a machine would also have the ability to recount votes and in a timely manner.
In response to the critique of the Electoral College, a valid point in questioning its existence can be seen. The fear that the Framers had in originally implementing the Electoral College has since almost completely diminished. Those fears, including nomination of unqualified candidates, have been eliminated by the increase in travel and public communication. So why keep the system around? Our election process has worked for centuries, electing the president with the most popular vote count. With only three elections otherwise, I would say the Framers’ system is valid. Though it may seem your vote doesn’t matter, it does. The electoral votes your state contributes are decided upon the people’s vote.
The purpose of the election process is to ensure that the leader of our nation is elected by the people and is an accurate representation of the voices of the whole population. Each election year when people decide it’s not worth their time to vote, they are letting only a fraction of the nation choose the next leader. Those people that believe their vote counts are more correct than they can imagine, because since they are the only ones voting, their opinion is the deciding factor.
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