Contrary to what you may hear, it is not every citizen’s duty to vote, unless he or she has the mental faculties and are informed on the issues and the candidates up for election. People should not feel inclined to vote simply based on a misplaced sense of duty and the issue of possible voter-means testing should be examined.
The notion that it is every citizen’s duty to vote is interesting. Most take that to mean that every few years they should take an hour off work and go pull levers for issues they haven’t mastered. If this is, as it seems for too many Americans, the sense of duty they feel, forget it.
The real duty is to do the research and cast an informed vote. That doesn’t seem to happen all that often, when one examines how many measures passed by the public are thrown out by the courts, or if one looks at the number of undecided or “don’t know” answers given to polls.
It is not the place of the uninformed to decide elections just because they were taught in third grade that they must. At some point, the question of whether it is appropriate to institute some form of voter testing will have to be addressed.
America’s founding fathers did not intend for everyone to vote. While their criteria for voting eligibility were wrong — using race, gender and land ownership is not acceptable — the principle for some sort of means testing has a precedent.
Some like to argue that it is the death of a democracy when the majority of its citizens don’t turn out to have a say in the running of the state. But that simply doesn’t hold true when one realizes that there are widely varying levels of knowledge and wisdom that make some opinions more valuable than others. While every individual has the same innate value under the law, their opinions do not, as evidenced by the fact that America elects representatives to use their wisdom on a daily basis for the betterment of the country.
In conclusion, elections are very important and shouldn’t be taken lightly, as it often seems many do. It is your duty to cast an informed ballot or none at all. Make the right choice this year.