One of the candidates I have to choose from

As one of many out-of-state students at Penn, I plan to submit an absentee ballot in this year’s general election.

I’ve put a lot of thought into deciding who I want to be president, and having recently made my decision, I was ready to vote and excited to have gotten my absentee ballot in the mail the other day.

I opened the envelope, and looked at the ballot. Crap.

Not only am I expected to vote for president and vice president, but also for two congressmen, 8 justices, a handful of county officials and six state constitutional amendments that I know nothing about.

Seeing the amount of time I would need to adequately research the candidates and amendments in order to make an informed decision, I went straight to my local news website. Since I’m not at home to experience the current political campaigns first hand, I figured going to the net would be the next best thing.

Unfortunately, even in the special section on the upcoming election, it was really hard to find information on the races that were going on in my area since the site focused on the state as a whole.

It’s important that local news outlets publish information about elections so that absentee voters can make informed decisions. It’s a scary thought to know that there are people voting absentee who are less motivated to seek out information than I am.

I also wonder how absentee voters got information about the candidates before the Internet. A child of the Information Age, I can only guess what voters did in the past.

Absentee voting is a lot more complicated than I thought. I have a lot of Googling ahead of me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.