According to CNN, in 2016, only 55% of voting aged citizens voted in the presidential election, which was a 20 year low. A lot of people think that everyone should vote in US elections. There are plenty of suggestions for getting more people to vote. One idea is to make Election Day a national holiday so that nobody has work that day and everybody has time to vote. There's also GOTV (Get Out the Vote) campaigns where people go door to door to try to make people vote, often for a particular candidate. A more extreme suggestion is to make voting mandatory for everyone who turns 18, kind of like jury duty. Actually, some other countries have mandatory voting starting at age 18 such as Greece and Mexico. This last suggestion seems a little less then democratic, but that's an argument for another article.

Not only should voting not be mandatory, but not everyone should be encouraged to do it. Now of course millennials are not voting as much as they should be and of course more people should vote in general. But the only people who should be voting are informed people. If someone is pressured into voting but they don't know who the Vice President is or never read the news unless you count the comics should they really be voting?

Voting is obviously a very important part of living in a democratic Republic. Do we want people who don't know or don't care about politics to help elect our next leaders that could serve for 2,4, or even 6 years? Now you could say that one vote doesn't matter that much. But if a bunch of people who are apathetic at best or ignorant at worst to politics vote because they just feel like they should, it starts to add up. Someone should not fill out a ballot and just look for the D or the R, or the woman or the man, or the name they recognize. They should be informed before they make such an important decision. Of course, there are always going to be a lot of people who vote like this. But we shouldn't encourage more of them.

That isn't to say that we shouldn't encourage more people to vote. We should just encourage politically informed people to vote. There are a lot of young people who are intelligent and passionate who would love to learn more about politics and make more informed decisions when it comes to voting. So instead of encouraging people who either don't know or don't care about politics to vote, we should inform potential voters and get them to vote.

And think of it this way. If you teach people, young or old, about politics and candidates and why politics matters and why it's important, they will get excited. Not only will they learn about politics but they will start to really care about it too. And hopefully, without further encouragement, they'll be lining up at the polls. Politics isn't everyone's cup of tea, and that's ok. But instead of encouraging everyone to vote, we should create more informed voters. That is the way to make the most of voting in America.