Do You Vote By Consensus or Conscience?

I’ve been chewing on PunditMom’s post “How Are You Going to Vote?” for a while now.  Mostly because it’s a subject that bothers me every election.  PunditMom queries each of us if we are voting by consensus or by conscience?  In other words, are we voting with the herd or voting with our heart?  Are we casting our ballot for the candidate most likely to win or the one who best represents our world view, our stand on the issues, and who we think can lead our country as we wish it should be?

I have long thought that most of us choose a candidate to vote for using the least brain-wracking methods.  We choose candidates based on what party we believe we are in and most of the time we have signed on to a political party because that’s the party our parents, boyfriend/girlfriend, or husband/wife is in.  We choose candidates because that’s who someone we know is voting for — my grandmother always voted for whomever my grandfather told her and after he died, she would always ask my parents who she should vote for, though she never liked their non-Republican answer.  Then there are those of us who are hung up on just one or maybe two issues.  Nothing else matters as much.  As long as the candidate swears on the souls of his or her dead ancestors that he or she will do everything in his or her power to grant their wishes on that one issue, there are those of us who will sell our vote.  We choose candidates because that’s who’s leading in the polls and we like to be part of the winning team.  We choose because of peer pressure.  We choose because that’s who our preacher or our favorite talk show host told us to choose.  We choose because the candidate had more advertising or more mudslinging ads.  We choose because the candidate is the right skin color or is the right religion or is the right gender or is better looking or has the right education or married the right wife.

We often choose candidates for a lot of the wrong reasons.

I wonder how many people spend time investigating what issues are important to the candidates and what their stand is on all of the issues.  How many of us just take for granted that what we hear on the news or the talk shows or read on blogs is true?  How much of that is negative?  How much of that is positive?  Both can be overblown.  The best way to get to the truth is to go to the source.  Check out the candidates by connecting with their campaign somehow whether through the internet or through their local offices.  Don’t limit yourself to the media’s so-called “front runners;”  after all, this time last presidential election, the media was already claiming Howard Dean the DNC nominee and then he didn’t win any of the primaries.

Vote your conscience and your heart.  Make your vote count by voting for the candidate who best represents you, the one you want to win, not the one you think will win.  We have to stop this cycle.  I keep hearing that voters are tired of the choices we’re given but the truth is that we are perpetuating the system that promotes those choices.  Until we start letting the suppliers of those candidates know that we don’t want their brand of politician anymore, nothing is going to change.  The way we do that is by voting for our best candidate not the candidate we think is best likely to win.

Tagged as: 2008 Presidential election, DNC, Howard Dean, politics, vote