We as citizens have a right to vote, no a responsibility to. To be active members of our community and to express our right to vote as a voice in our democracy. For not being active citizens make us helpless and content with the faults of our government which not only hurts our lives but the lives of our neighbors.
We as citizens shouldn’t vote, especially given that our voice has so little sway and won’t actually affect the outcome of the election. Not to mention that being our relative inexperience to the complexities of adulthood and the history of our nation, we should really refine our views before casting an inexperienced and uninformed vote out into the annals of democracy.
Voting should be a reflection of the populous and thus should represent the views of the people, by not voting we are causing voting to be represented by only the most impassioned and radical of viewpoints swaying the major voter bases from the central, to the more far left and far right causing increased partisanship and lack of cooperation and less efficient government.
Voting is a reflection of the people by promoting the idea of voting being a mandatory thing along with getting informed about the civic issues what occurs is a majority of uninformed voters who believe they are informed, which in turn makes news and coverage skew toward this massive uninformed public thus dumbing down and making politics more about rhetorical manipulation as opposed to actual informed opinions.
The best way to become an active citizen in our nation is to form, challenge, refine and learn as students of our society. By participating in the civic duty we have to vote we are becoming active citizens and thus becoming more informed making our viewpoints more intelligent.
By forming opinions so fast we gain bias that prevents us from learning as quickly, if we wait to form opinions and become ‘active’ citizens we gain experience so that when we finally form opinions those opinions will be much more thorough thus making our viewpoints more intelligent.
The group being underrepresented at the polls is the younger generation, by not participating as much in voting we make it so that the future leaders of the nation can’t properly have the infrastructure to excel. If we vote and become active members of our political community we can help the future by having the best knowledge of what we need to be the best we can be.
By having younger voters pressured to vote so much we are causing many more uninformed voters at the polls. Due to the complexity of politics and the overall unhelpful press we are feeding back into having simplistic easy to formulate ideologies reigning supreme, which is causing political regression. This makes all positions on a topic less informed and thus less able to properly refute each others claims, causing an increase to partisanship.
Half of the nation thinks that they are voting for the correct candidate, and passionately so. But how do I know I’m on the correct side? How do I know that I’m not one of the delusional uninformed voters, even if I am (ridiculously unlikely) thorough enough to check my facts, how many people have gone much deeper than I and had the opposite outcome, could I truly out justify the experts of economic theory when I decide I’m capitalist, or communist. Even if I have a 55% chance to pick the best candidate for the future of the country, will my new found biases keep me from developing further? Is it better if I wait a while and get a 60% chance to pick the best candidate in the future but not have the bias due to my better mental maturity and insight?
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t vote, but I think we need to delve deeper before we all jump on the bandwagon to get young voters, I’d rather have 1000 really diverse and informed people than 1000000 uninformed people decide the future of our country. So I think that you have a civic duty to know when you should and shouldn’t vote. But whatever you decide, the worst thing you can do is vote uninformed.
There is proof that the level of speeches by U.S. presidents has been trending downwards, some of this is good. It means that speeches aren’t being solely targeted toward rich educated white guys. But some of it is bad, it’s becoming harder to get the nuances of the complexities of politics when we only get the abridged simplified versions.