One week until the election. Seven days to decide if you’ll cast your vote.
As I walk through campus and see volunteers in Collegetown dedicated to registering as many voters as possible, I can’t help but think: for most of us, our vote in the national election doesn’t matter (it does in our local elections). Unless you’re voting in a swing state — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or North Carolina — the outcome is already a foregone conclusion. To the 31 percent of the student body from New York, your 28 electoral votes will certainly go to the Democratic candidate — it is the same in my home state of Maryland. I could go on about how this is an apparent flaw in our system, where few votes in very few states decide the outcome. However, I’m not here to tell you we must change the system. Instead, I want to tell you that despite your (nonexistent) impact on the result of the national election, you still need to vote.
I’ll give you three reasons why…