If you aren’t aware that this presidential election cycle is a mess on both a political and moral level, you probably haven’t been paying too much attention to the election cycle- I can’t say that I blame you, it seems like the smarter option most days. But in any event, I’m a politics major, so this is kind of something I have to pay attention to. I figured I might as well try to write some articles about some lessons I’ve learned from this campaign so far.

Remember the whole kerfuffle back in April about the Colorado Republican caucuses? If not, the very short version of what happened is that Donald Trump got upset (shocking, I know) that he didn’t win a single delegate from Colorado, and blamed the result on the slightly unusual system of electing delegates that colorado had.

To sum up the difference in a nutshell, people who wanted to help select delegates had to attend a several hour long meeting discussing what each candidate stood for before making a selection instead of just tapping a button on an electronic screen with a candidate's name beside it.

I think this is something that other state parties should learn from- and not just for the fact that it was a result that went against Trump (too late for that anyways, he’s already won the Republican nomination).

Let me make an analogy. Imagine you’re having invasive and critical surgery done on your heart- if this operation fails, you will likely die. When you meet the doctor before the operation, you find out that the people who choose her to perform surgery on you was a group of english majors.

I think I speak for everyone when I say that this would be something of a worrying prospect. So why is it considered inherently a good thing for people to have little to no knowledge of politics to be part of the decision making process for choosing the President- who is viewed by many as the most single powerful man in the world.

This is not to say that I want to keep people out of the election making process- far from it. Instead, I want people who are interested in spending one or two hours of their life every election cycle to attend a meeting where representatives from each candidate openly discuss what their candidate supports. That's it. I want to empower people to make informed and responsible decisions about who ought to govern.

Will this reduce turnout? I wouldn’t be surprised if it did- but I would consider this a feature, not a bug. If someone can’t be bothered to spend, at most two hours, in an admittedly somewhat boring meeting to help get a better grasp of which candidate is more qualified to hold political office and become a public servant, I don’t think they should be voting. Just like I wouldn’t want a group of English majors to decide who would be best to perform heart surgery on me.