The Influence of Voting on the Decisions Making in the Country

Voting was established around the year 1776 in the United States of America, and only white men over the age of 21 and older with property had the right to vote during that date. Catholics and Jews were not permitted to vote at that time, but as the years went on it kept getting better, women were allowed to vote at the age of 21 and older, and most ethnicities could also participate in voting, although It wasn’t until the late 1900’s that all men and women age 18 and older, regardless of race, religion, or education, had the right to vote. The 24th Amendment was also created during this time which eliminated poll taxes (a fee you had to pay to vote, enabling the seclusion of poor people during voting) nationwide. People in the present day will argue about how important voting really is in this nation. There will be claims that your vote does not matter because “No single vote has ever decided a presidential election”, or “Nor is your vote consequential in margins of victory, or your non-vote consequential in turnout numbers”, but there are also people that believe otherwise, “I urge any and all people reading this to realize how big a part of democracy voting is. My position in relation to this topic is that voting does influence the decisions made in this country, and people should vote.

Some people like Kathryn Bullington would argue that an essential part of our Gov’t in this day and age is voting. Voting is an important act in a democratic republic because it lets the people residing in it have a voice and an opinion in said gov’t. Some people would go as far as to claim that voting is what makes this constitution what it is, “What binds us together more than our history of striving for freedom, our bond of exercising our free will for a better life, or our rights guaranteed by our constitution? What tool do we have to protect and maintain our freedoms to live as we choose? Our Vote!”. Many freedoms, like the freedom of speech and religion, that we exercise in our daily lives would be taken away if we didn’t vote, a dictatorship would form, and people’s rights wouldn’t be preserved. Voting is a primal action that all the citizens in United States of America should consider doing. Voting enables representatives to choose what taxes you will pay, they also form the council/ gov’t, which decide what to do with major issues that could arise in certain topics, such as education, laws and the police. What can people do to stimulate greater output from others, so that people who don’t vote start voting? Many people nowadays are interested in an exchange for their time and effort. So, we could have a system in place where the gov’t rewards the average citizen for voting in an intellectual manner, and I say intellectual because the citizen must know what he/she is voting for, they wouldn’t be allowed to vote without any prior knowledge of what the candidates are about and what they stand for. This reward would be in the form of money, essentially making it so that you get paid to vote. This way citizens who don’t normally vote will be incentivized to do so.

Another way we could approach the situation would be to include the citizens taxes into this. If you vote you will be entitled to a reduced taxation rate for a specific time period. You could even have a streak going, like you would with an app called Snapchat, where if you and a friend send a picture once a day consecutively, you get to keep a streak that ranges from day one to whenever that streak dies which will be the day when either person in that streak decides or forgets to send a daily picture to the other person. If citizens kept voting in an intellectual manner consecutively they would have a greater reduction in their taxes, which would be exponentially greater over time. We must make voting a well-practiced act in our country, because with it lessening we would eventually lose our freedom that we have been gifted with since the creation of this gov’t that supports this country. Voting makes your voice be heard, and if you don’t vote you are not helping the country change in any way.

Bryan Caplan has a different point of view on the subject. “I do not vote. Since I’m an economist, the parsimonious explanation is that (a) I know the probability of voter decisiveness is astronomically low, and (b) I selfishly value my time. But that’s hardly adequate. I spend my time on many quixotic missions, like promoting open borders. So why not vote?” (Caplan). Some people may say that voting just takes a few minutes. Therefore, implying that one should vote and not wine about it, but that isn’t the main issue for Richard O. Hammer as he explains why he believes that voting is not wise “…the short time it takes to vote is not the main issue. The main issue is the whole habit, the propensity to care about the consequences of majority rule. If I care about voting, or if I care about the outcome of some election, that shows where my heart lays up its treasure. To the extent that voting reinforces my addiction to myths of majority rule, then by voting I carry my psyche further away from home. I reinforce the wrong virtues while neglecting to exercise the correct virtues”. If a person votes, he participates and endorses the “process” of it and the elected officials do and say in your name, making you part guilty of whatever is to come if you voted for that representative. You share responsibility of whatever happens in the country, if you vote. “To not vote DOES NOT mean one relinquishes the right to then comment on, complain about, or protest the actions of the government, it is completely the other way around. When one votes one effectively makes a contractual agreement (the voter is officially recorded doing so), which hands over the right for someone else to speak and act in their name, and as such, assents to whatever the government does thereafter”.

Therefore, according to Rorschach, a person who did not vote is given the right to complain, object and protest all they want, because they did not give someone else the power to speak for them. Voting can also be perceived as a way to participate in mob rule (control of a political situation by those outside the conventional or lawful realm, typically involving violence and intimidation), that mob rule then can enforce its perspective on the rest of the people and incite for violence. There are many people in this country that genuinely do not care about political issues surrounding their country.