Indoctrination and the culture we create

SWMBO (who is in her mid-30s) has never voted- she's always said that she just didn't feel like she knew enough about the issues or the candidates to be able to make any kind of informed decision so she felt that it was wrong to be voting without being prepared. It's not like it would have been onerous, we live literally right next to our polling place.

This will be the first election in which she is planning to vote- in part because the majority of the time since the last Presidential election has been spent living with me who typically does follow what's going on and will try and keep her at least informed on the major events and players and in part because it's pretty much impossible to NOT have a good idea regarding things in this election (though different people of course see things through their own often VERY different lenses).

KyAllroad wrote:

fasted58 wrote: I will probably vote against one candidate rather than for the other candidate. Not pleased w/ that but what's the option.

This is a great time to vote third party.

Except even they chose someone who doesn't really stand for what they believe in.....although the dude would probably do better than the big two....

Mitchell wrote: This is a great topic. What I haven't figured out yet is how to be an organized voter - not in the labor sense, but keeping track of elections, finding sources of information with the least noise, etc. It often seems like being an informed citizen is a full-time job in itself, and I already have one of those. Flight Service (and others), how do you keep track of it all?

In my experience, its the local and state shiny happy people are who really screws up your life, so that is what you have to look out for.

DC is easy to keep up with, it is just the volume coming out of there, so I subscribe to lobbying groups that watch those issues and updates from the sub-committees.

As far as state, I cheat, I lean on lobbyist and my involvement in the local government committees keep me in the loop on those. For Jersey you can follow the legislative agenda calender to see what bills are coming forward. Probably have a mailing list with updates too.

Local I rely on mailing list updates. Where I live they post it in the court house, the web page and on mailing lists.

The level of effort to keep up goes up and down with the calendar but it is about an hour a week.

Now a note about lobbyists they are selling you their side. I use them for a notification of bills NOT to develop the opinion. Like the recent no mod street car thing SEMA put out. If I would have listened to them I would have been up in arms. Instead it was a poorly worded rule that was intended to end coal rolling trucks and had nothing to do with cars. But I had to read the bill and what it applied to.

Let me know if you need any help.

I know people who are on the fence about voting or don't give a berkley about it. I've told them to take 10 minutes to look at candidates/issues/platforms and go vote. People in other parts of the world would clamor for the ability to vote!