Important voting instructions!!

You may have seen the adds for all the Get Out the Vote and the Vote or Loose campaigns, ect. They all want you to vote; to get as many people as possible to perform their civic duty. And they all have an agenda...most target young people - a rather large group - who don't normally vote for some reason, but when they do, tend to be liberal...how convienient, no? I would have to say that, statistically, at least one would be honest, just wanting to get people to vote. But certainly not all.

Anyways, they all claim to just want you to get out and perform your civic duty and vote. Well, guess what: you don't have the civic duty to vote. In fact, there are times when you should just stay home on the polling day. Why wouldn't you vote, if you are perfectly able and willing? I will explain:

The founding fathers, even more than a monarchy, feared mob rule. They knew that the average bumkin was not smart enough, not informed enough, to make a proper decision on who would be in charge of their country. They would fall to the ebbs and tides of popular opinion, easily swayed to someone else's informed opinion, as they have none of their own. Prone to vasilate in their own opinion, depending on whom they are talking to at the time. Or, even worse, a person would vote right on party lines - not because of any agreement philisophicaly, but just because it is their party, which must have, at one time, appealed to them in some way, but now may be completely different, and the voter will not notice, or care - have to vote for my party. If such a thing happened today, pretty much every election (at least presidential) would go to the Democrats, the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. Also, there are people that are just too stupid to operate a voting machine properly. Even the incredibly simple butterfly ballot is too hard for some people. Those people should not vote. All these are most definitely NOT what the Founders wanted.

Well, David, you are saying that just because I am a Democrat?
No, not at all. I am saying that if you have not done research into actual positions, actual political history, of each candidate. You should ABSOLUTELY NOT vote entirely based on what the candidates will say they will do. Campaign promises are not promises; they are but possiblilties, mere suggestions to the candidate if elected. The only campaign promises you should even begin to believe are the ones that they have been actively persuing in the past, and havn't accomplished. Unfortunately, we, as Americans (even as a human species it seems; but Americans especially), vote based on what a candidate says, not on what they have done, and thus will most likely do in the future. If this is you, do not vote.

If you have based your vote on the debates, do not vote. Nothing new was said; nothing changed from before (except the polls...); it is just for useful soundbites and seeing who can give a better speech. All I said about campaign promises above doubles, triples, here.

If you are basing your vote just on what you see on the news, or read in the newspapers, do not vote. You are not properly informed. You are only partially informed. You need to look around. Congressional records, or state records, are pretty good. You don't have to hit the books yourself; someone else has done the research, and posted the results on the internet. You just have to look for that. (Sometimes it would just be easier to just look up those records yourself). A good place to look is Factcheck.org. They...check the facts...of what the candidates say. That is a good way to stay informed. Shoot, if you actually read the e-mailed articles I send you, you are pretty well-informed, but I would still suggest you do some of your own work, too.

This is not just my opinion. Go here and read what this guy says, at least up to the first emoticon. The rest is about a campaign rally. If you want to read the rest, be my guest. If not, as it is quite long, read the begining part.