imagining growing and watching Barack Obama being elected as the first black President. It must have been exciting and you most certainly wanted to be a part of the process. What if I told in three points that it didn’t matter whether you voted or not?
My first point: The Electoral College.
According to archives.gov, the Electoral College is a group of an individuals who are chosen by their party to ultimately decide in December who the President will be in the coming new year. This already is strange when people are voting for “The President” in November.
There is no specific law or prerequisite for becoming an Electoral College member. The members themselves decide from their party who will be the Electoral College.
Now some people would say that the Electoral College was put in place to protect most of the population. I would say they were wrong because the Electoral College was set up around the time of George Washington was President. Around that time only Caucasian men could vote. So how was the Electoral College made to protect everyone.
There is no law to protect our votes in November. Even if the people all voted for someone and the Electoral College disagreed, they could vote opposite of what the popular vote was among the people.
Second point: The inconsistency from the polls.
According to snopes.com, during the 2016 presidential election Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote but still lost the election. And according to history.com, the 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore, Al Gore won the popular vote, but Bush won the election. Think about that.
Third point: Gerrymandering
Every 10 years when the US census occurs, districts of every city are redesigned based off of the information gathered by the census. Gerrymandering is the manipulation of this redesign to benefit one party over the other. Look at the image below.
This image shows you exactly how Gerrymandering can benefit and sway things for one party over there. This creates a manipulated voting system as districts are designed with a bias in mind.
I’m not saying that we absolutely shouldn’t vote, but I am saying that the voting system in place doesn’t care that we do. Even though our votes matter to us, they don’t matter to them. So maybe we need to protest and stop the system in its tracks by not allowing anyone to vote because with this system in place voting is useless.