Carmen High School of Science and Technology Should Americans Be Required to Vote? Sintia Ortega American Government Period 5 Ms. Engibous 5/3/13 Sintia Ortega American Government Ms.Engibous Period 5 5/3/13 Should Americans Be Required to Vote? Americans should be required to vote because less and less people have voted making our country look lazy bums. What will happen if everyone decides not to vote anymore? Since World War II no other election has ever involved 65% or more registered voters.
• The makeup of the electorate: What types of people were allowed and not allowed to vote? • Campaign practices: How did candidates organize their campaigns and make themselves known to the people? • Background of candidates: How were Adams’s and Jackson’s backgrounds different, and how did they compare to those of earlier presidents? • Voter turnout: About how many people voted in the 1828 election compared to earlier elections? |Your Score |___ of 50 | There has been a majority of differences since the elections of the 1800’s.
When evaluating the arguments raised on both sides it I believe that the Electoral College should be replaced by a national popular vote. An argument that exposes the weakness of the Electoral College and why it should be replaced by a national popular vote is because the ‘winner takes all’ system distorts the results of the elections. There have been various results in which the popular vote did not reflect the results of the Presidential election. A notorious example of how distorted results can be under the Electoral College is that of Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Though Al Gore won the popular vote by 48.4% Bush won the votes of the Electoral College which resulted in him winning the Presidential election.
For example according to the paper in the 1950s 53 percent of Americans in their 20s read newspaper coverage of national politics, while today only about 30 percent watch any kind of news coverage and 24 percent don’t even care to watch at all. This shows that the argument of a decaying news audience is well supported by studies and statistics. Another big source of information for this essay is Nielsen/ NetRatings. Nielsen is a company that mainly focuses on providing companies such as NBC, CBS, and ABC numbers on many things including the number of viewers at a determined hour, peak times, primetime information and results on new shows. Although there are problems with Nielsen methods, for example they only survey people by phone calls and do not
Between 1945 and 1997, electoral turnout was between 71% and 83%. However, every election from 2001 has seen the lowest turnout since 1945, with a record low being 59% in 2001. The decline in electoral turnout certainly suggests a decline in interest and participation in politics. Voter apathy is on the rise – in 2001, ITV reported that 70% of viewers showed little or no interest in the publication of election results – while party identification figures are falling. The percentage of people with ‘very strong’ identification with either of the two main parties was a low 13% in 2001.
The most obvious form of political participation is, of course, voting- usually through general elections and referendums. However, the percentage of people who voted in a general election dropped from 83% in 1984 to 72% in 2000, and only 65% of people voting in the 2010 general election. This may well be due to a lack of interest in modern politics, or the feelings that your vote will not have a great impact on the outcome of the election, or a distrust of many of the politicians standing for election. In addition, Crewe’s survey of young people in Britain found that 80% of British pupils engaged in little or no discussion of political affairs at home. If the height of interaction between young people and politics is so limited, it seems doubtful that the political interest of tomorrow will be any better than the political interest of today.
In this report various drawback s and strengths of voting methods will be discussed and analyzed, including the combination of criteria that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem states no rank-ordered voting method can satisfy. Several cities around the country have experimented recently with instant runoff voting (IRV). Some of these cities have experienced dissatisfaction with this method and have eliminated it after only a few elections. Some reasons for this quick turnaround will be discussed in terms of the drawbacks of instant runoff voting. Another voting method used in political elections, the Borda count, will be discussed.
Waiting Times at Ballot Boxes Draw Scrutiny. Voting Time American Government 2301 Instructor Mary Lou “The New York Times” has published an article that relates to voting and the problems that people experience during the process. “Waiting Times at Ballot Boxes Draw Scrutiny” is the title of an article written by Jeremy Peters. He addresses some of the most important issues that pertain to the right of people to vote, their equal ability to do so and the government that has a responsibility before the citizens to provide best and accessible conditions to cast the vote. The article also gives some hints and clues to the separation between classes and minorities who have a different experience and possibility to vote.
If a party gains a majority it will be offered the chance to form government by the Queen. The MP is then responsible for representing all constituents, even those who didn’t elect the member. For example in 2005 George Galloway received only 18.4% of his constituents but was still elected MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. [1] This high proportion of constituents who didn’t vote for Galloway is not a unique anomaly, during the 2005 election only three MPs secured more than 40% of their constituents votes. It may be argued that voter apathy has a large influence on this
Voting will effect change within neighborhoods, cities, states, countries, and even the world. Voting is the principle means of a representative government. How can a government be representative if roughly 45-50 percent of eligible voters don't vote? This makes a government only representative to half of the