Voting: A Civic Duty or a Burden?

Is voting a civic duty… or a burden?

I sincerely hope that this is not the case, collegiettes, but some of you might be asking yourselves, “Why should I vote? My voice doesn’t matter. It’s just a waste of my time.”

If you are feeling cynical about voting in the upcoming election, don’t worry; you’re not alone. A New York Times article claims that the youngest voting population is showing a “growing lack of faith in government in general, according to interviews, experts, and leading polls.”

Although polls show that Americans under 30 are likely to support the president by a large margin, the article also states that young people who were hit hardest by the recession are beginning to shift their political ideology towards a more conservative outlook. This is especially true for voters between the ages of 18 and 24, according to a poll created in the spring of 2012 by the Harvard Institute of Politics.

The poll also showed a huge number of undecided voters between the ages of 18 to 29. “30 percent indicated that they had not yet made up their mind. And turnout among this group is expected to be significantly lower than for older voters.”

But the economy couldn’t be the only deciding factor, right? There is so much at stake in this election – especially for young people. JMU students offer their ideas about why students might not want to vote, and talk about the issues that are most important in this election.

Dan, a freshman SMAD major, argues that some people are not pleased or satisfied with either of the democratic or republican candidates, and they don’t understand that their option could go to a third party vote.

“They don’t want to feel like they were partly responsible in electing someone who could potentially have an adverse effect on their future,” Dan said.

Carey, a senior communication major, thinks the issue could be that people just are not made aware of all their options in voting away from their hometown.

“I just learned the other day that you can register in Virginia as a student if you live on or off campus and vote here [in Harrisonburg]. I think that sometimes people are just unaware of the options that they have such as filling out an absentee ballot, which is actually pretty easy,” Carey said.

Cristiana, a sophomore psychology major, believes that college women should be concerned about their futures because the social and economic issues in this election affect them greatly, but she argues that it is still a tough decision.
“I think it’s a lose-lose situation because one candidate is promising to fix the economy and the other is promising to protect our social issues, so you’re kind of screwed either way,” Cristiana said.

Harry, a freshman political science major, thinks that women have a lot to lose in this election. He says on one hand, there is a candidate who has proposed overturning Roe v. Wade and another candidate who is pro-choice. President Obama passed the Lily Ledbetter Act and he is not sure that the Romney would have done so.

“I think as far as economic equality, social quality among reproductive rights and things in that nature, there is a huge stake in this election,” Harry said.

Both of the presidential candidates have very different ideas for combating the deficit, federal spending and creating jobs; education and how they approach federal loans; health care, Medicare, and Medicaid; and social issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

The key to figuring out what these diverging paths of government are – and which path you agree with – is to step away from biased media coverage and finding the candidates’ plans from the source: the party platforms. Should you read through all 32 pages of the Democrat Party Platform and the 62 pages of the Republican Party Platform? Not if you don’t want your eyes to glaze over.

The best method would to be to find a website that compares the key points from each platform side-by-side in their own words, such as the one from Compare2012. This website’s goal was to create a non-partisan comparison because “it’s all too easy to base our voting decisions on the generalized belief that one party is ‘a bunch of socialists’ or that the other ‘only cares about the wealthy.’ And it’s just as easy to make our voting decisions based on one or two issues without considering the larger implications of what voting for one party means.”

Sources:
Compare 2012: Platform Party Comparison
http://compare2012.returncontrol.com/

“Stung By Recession: Young Voters Shed Image as Obama Brigade” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/us/politics/economy-cuts-into-obamas-y…