Quote:
Originally Posted by The Supreme Canuck
It isn't just this issue, though. It is politics in general - people just do not care. But then they complain about how the government is running things. It seems like they do care, but do not care enough to get off their couch and inform themselves.
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I haven't read the entire thread and don't know if I'll have time, so I apologize if what I say has been covered.
I don't know if it's so much that people don't care, it's that the system itself is inherently inefficient. I don't mean just a little bit, like your average corporation, I mean really really ridiculously inefficient to the point that you sometimes just feel like throwing up your hands and giving up.
Take this past Tuesday, for instance. The weekend before, I learned there was an election because my girlfriend told me. Perhaps I should have known since they're at regular intervals, but I don't know what those intervals are. They were never covered in school, it almost never comes up in conversation for some reason, and I can't seem to find a good website or calendar program that will remind me of these things. That last one is critical; my memory is terrible and I rarely can remember what I did two days ago, let alone a yearly occurance. Without my Outlook calendar I doubt I'd ever remember anyones birthday.
So Monday evening I went online and spent
four hours researching candidates. In the end I learned about 50% of the names of people who were running, and of those I knew where about a third of them stood on issues. This is information that should have taken me all of ten minutes to find from a central resource that compiled the information. I'll be the first to admit that I did not vote (entirely) intelligently. How could I? I have never seen information about any subject so hard to find. I could google instructions on building a nuclear reactor easier!
Granted, this was somewhat more difficult because it was a local election, but I have run into the same problem when voting for federal positions. There was a site listed on page one of this thread that helped you find a candidate by reading quotes. Helpful websites like that are few and far between, and even those are terribly inefficient. What we need is a comprehensive, neutral, essay format questionnaire answered by every candidate so we can compare answers side by side...in a central place so that they can't spin their answers for each crowd.
It's not apathy that keeps people from making a difference, it's ignorance and the unwillingness to address the causes of that ignorance. When we can research and compare candidates as quickly and easily as we can different brands and models of video cards, I think you'll see much higher voter turnout and much more consistent and intelligent voting. But while the average person needs to spend every second of free time for weeks on end just to get the most basic of data, it's just not going to be worth it to most people.