Voting doesn't matter my ass!!

Prepare yourself...

The idea has been presented that voting doesn't matter, and I'm going to crush it.

Actually, what's been presented is a Facebook post asking if there is value to voting. The post I'm responding to says that proponents or opponents of voting will either use a "utility" argument or a "duty" argument in order to sway the other members of a conversation to support their views (to vote, or not to vote).

Vote. Please vote. I'm gonna tell you why. 

I speak a lot about complacency in my writings and blogposts, and I can see in the facebook conversation I'm reading that there's a whole bunch of complacency.

Some members of society, including myself (and Lawrence Lessig, watch his talk on enacting change here) hold a belief that one of the MANY reasons it's difficult to enact change in the United States is that a large population of the United States believes that Congress and big government are doing poorly, but very few think they can do anything to change it. 

"Now politicians and pundits tell you, there's nothing we can do about this issue, Americans don't care about it, but the reason for that is that 91 percent of Americans think there's nothing that can be done about this issue. And it's this gap between 96 and 91 that explains our politics of resignation," said Lessig. 

Funny. If you don't do anything to enact change, change isn't going to happen.

But no, it's not as simple as that. The first step to enacting change is to decide to change shit. The next step is to come up with a comprehensive plan. In my case, the next step is to choose a comprehensive plan developed by a public intellectual that I like.

But I don't want to start here. I want to start at the state level elections, which are part of the midterm elections.

A lot of the legislation that affects your everyday life happens on the state level. Is there corruption on the state level? Sure. But it's usually more quid pro quo than the corruption going on at the national level, because the corruption on the national level is more an issue of money in politics, which I comprehensively rant about on a daily basis. 

State level elections need people who care about their districts and want to work for the good of the citizens. Now, if you make an informed vote in a state election for the state senator working in your district, you're GOING TO HAVE AN EFFECT ON LEGISLATION PASSED IN YOUR DISTRICT. Smaller amounts of people go out to vote, and your vote has a greater impact.

State elections are soooo close so often, but nobody really pays attention to them. We piss on the national elections all the time, but we don't give nearly enough press and care to the elections happening closest to home.

So, yes, on the state level, your vote absolutely matters. You can vote on ballot questions and share your views, and you can vote for the candidate who holds the same platform as you, whether it be red, blue, green or rainbow.

The biggest issue in state voting is that we need more poli sci students running and working on the state level to improve infrastructure and help the people, and we need a greater circulation of officers, instead of one incumbent making the same lousy decisions year after year. We need citizens to pay attention to the state senate as well as the national senate because state senates also work with Congress.

NOW.

National elections are a shit show. I get that.

To those of you following the money in politics issue, you know why. I'm not gonna to get into that here. If you want to know what I'm talking about, go to this link: http://beanalive.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-i-back-mayday-pac.html

This outlines a plan to help fix the national elections. It's pretty damn cool.

But your vote still matters in national elections. Because elections are still decided by votes?! Yes, the electoral college is fucked up. Yes, dark money is ruining politics. But you're not going to get anything done if you don't educate yourself on the issues and get to the polls.

So yeah, agree with me or not, my view is stop being a pessimistic houseplant and get to the damn polls.