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Compulsory Voting

      It seems our electoral process brings confusion, frustration, and an utter lack of interest almost every national election.  Even in a controversial and bombarding election as the one we experienced in 2016, barely half of our eligible population participated in the voting process. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, the last time America had a turnout rate above sixty percent in a presidential election was the 1960s (besides Obama's 61% in 2008) and for mid-term elections that number has not reached fifty percent since 1912. Although voting may seem like a trivial aspect, it is a crucial facet of democracy and our nation’s leaders are being chosen by not even half of our population. This disproportion of voters actually participating in elections has created a divisive and gridlocked governmental system that is not representative of the true electorate. A solution to this issue could be to mimic Australia's successful electoral system of compul...
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Cutting Out Gerrymandering

     Congressional districts are hugely important to our governmental and electoral system and the gerrymandering of these districts has had many negative affects like obvious advantages given to the controlling party, increased party polarization, and the marginalization of certain groups of voters. Gerrymandering is when a state, county, etc. is divided into election districts in a way that favors one political party over another. This is typically done by the party that is in control of the government at that time so it is clear that there is a great deal of influence wielded by the party drawing up the districts.       The advantages that gerrymandering can bring to the majority-holding party can be seen in places like North Carolina where there are about an even number of Democrat to Republican voters yet Republicans hold the majority of congressional seats in North Carolina very comfortably because of their intensely gerrymandered districts. Thi...
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Stage 4: Trump's "Couched" Lies

     This is an opinion piece I found on RealClearPolitics.com but was originally posted from the New York Times on October 19th about President Trump's tendency to stretch the truth  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opinion/ . It was written by Charles M. Blow, who has been covering Trump's candidacy and Presidency in his opinion column since he had begun running and it seems safe to say that he has done his research. His intended audience is most likely both left and right wing Americans with his message about the completely failed comparison of Hitler to Trump geared towards Democrats and his message about Trump's inclination to lie and then shield himself from the lie, more directed at Republicans he hoped would take notice.      Blow's main claim in this editorial is that President Trump has had a continued history of making bold claims on twitter or to the news but using phrases like "I was told", "lots of people saying", or "people thi...
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