Why Dont People Participate In The Political Process

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate January 2002

download word file, 4 pages 0.0

Why Are There Not Enough People Voting Today? There are many, many reasons why people are voting these days. They could range from lack of knowledge about the candidates to being upset with the candidates to not having any transportation to a voting booth. People also make excuses like ?I had to fix my mothers water heater?, but no excuses should be accepted because voting is one of the most important privileges we get as being Americans. I have a possible solution to getting at least a 85% voter turnout, although I highly doubt that this would ever happen, because it is quite a stretch. This idea is to tax those people more money who do not get out to the voting booths. From what I heard people hate taxes so maybe from this suggestion, taxing the non-voters, there will be more reason to go out and vote. Or the politicians can do the opposite--give a tax break to those who do vote.

I believe this would even give greater incentive to vote.

Like this past election in Erie county, there were many candidates in many positions to vote for, and I heard of three of them. Rick Schenker and Judy Lynch were running for Erie County Executive, while the only person I heard of running for the Mayor of Erie was Rick Filippi. The first reason I think why people don?t vote is because they don?t follow the election religiously. There are so many positions that elections are held for, and so few get the publicity they should receive. Sure some positions are less demanding than the others, but they all deserve the same amount of publicity. For example, how would you feel if you only received 250 votes from a city of 100,000 people, while in the same...