The Importance Of Voting Part 1: Legislative Representatives

Why vote for more than just a Presidential candidate?

     The race for The White House brings out quite a few extra voters. This is evident when comparing midterm election numbers to Presidential election numbers. It’s not completely illogical. We, as Americans, see the President as a very important individual. We want someone who internally and externally will represent us. Who will believe the same things we do. We understand the importance of the President on the view of the United States by other nations. This is why my father doesn’t like Jimmy Carter. He always says, “Jimmy is a great southern gentleman, but he was too weak to be president.”
     It is because of the importance of the image of the President that we kind of bow our heads in shame at the mention of Watergate or Monica Lewinsky. So, don’t get me wrong, I understand that it is very important to vote for the President. In fact, I believe every citizen who has the great privilege of being able to vote for the President should in fact do so, in a well informed and educated manner. But, we are a representative democracy and as such, we need to understand the importance of every position that we have the great privilege to vote for. In every election, midterm or Presidential, we have the privilege of voting for our three most important representatives: our state house and state senate legislators and our U.S. Representative. This means that every two years, you have the opportunity to influence the way that laws will be made for the next two years.
     In a perfect world, a representative would vote with absolutely no bias and simply vote with the majority of the population in which they represent. But this is far from a perfect world, and representatives vote with their emotions, their bibles and their own world views, not necessarily the world views, bibles or emotions of the people they were elected to represent. So, just as it is most important to vote for a presidential candidate whom you feel is like minded, it is most beneficial to make an educated vote for state and federal representatives that you find like minded. This will be an immediate pay off when it comes to the way they vote, but it will also mean that when you write, email, call or send a petition to your representative, they will be more receptive to it.
     As citizens of The United States of America, we are given the great privilege of the ballot, and many refuse to use or acknowledge that privilege. If you can look in the mirror at yourself and honestly say to yourself that there isn’t a thing you’d change about your neighborhood, community, city, county, district(s), state, region, country or world, then by all means, turn a blind eye to electoral politics, but, if you, like me and so many other people on this planet, would like to see things change, then please take advantage of the tools given to you, for if you do not, then the situation in which we live in, in which future generations will be forced to live in, will just continue to deteriorate.

Thank you to my cousin for inspiring this article.

With Great Hope,

Alexander Fisher
"Those that dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the day to find that all was vanity, but the dreamers of the day, are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams and make them real."