To vote, or to rationally vote, that is the question?

"What did a vote express? Not a strong conviction that the party offered public policies; parties tended to be more devoted to distributing offices than to advocating policies. Party was related more to comradeship than to policy: it was more an attachment than a choice, something like a contemporary loyalty to a high school or college and its teams. Voting was not a matter of assent but a statement of affiliation. Drink, dollars, and drama brought people to the polls, and more than that, social connection, rarely anything more elevated." (Click Here for Democracy, Michael Schudson) It's funny to think that not until the beginning of the 20th century did our country have leaders chosen by an educated and rational voter. When voting first began, citizens would just merely approach the sheriff of the town and state their vote, with the two candidates on each side of them. As the years continued, things began to somewhat change, where the election day became a social gathering. "They viewed elections as affairs in which local citizens would vote for esteemed leaders of sound character and good family, deferring to a candidate's social pedigree more than siding with his policy preferences."

As the years pass on, the issue of bringing citizens to the voting booths still becomes an issue. Do people vote just because they're of age, or do they truly feel strongly about an issue? Is the candidate really the ideal person for the job, or do they just seem like a "cool guy"? Because of the media, sometimes our candidates are only viewed on the surface and young adults don't take the actual time to analyze just who they're voting to put in office. Schudson's article also brings up how the Internet has brought the world to our fingers, especially when it comes to politics. "The Internet does not erase existing structures of politics. If it gives to ordinary citizens new tools for gathering information and expressing views, think of how much more it offers to political professionals who spend forty to eighty hours a week on politics, not four to eight minutes."

We can see that over the past decade, more and more young adults are coming to the voting booths. We'd like to think that it has been because of encouragement at school, or through celebrity endorsements like with "Rock the Vote!" (http://www.rockthevote.com/), a site that uses music, popular culture and new technologies to engage and incite young people to register and vote in every election, however we can never be sure. We can only hope that the process of educating our future voters continues more and more, as we've seen in the growth of knowledge in our voters over the past centuries.