I wasn’t planning on voting in the upcoming election

With overwhelming controversy about the upcoming election over Trump vs. Hillary, and many voters nationwide unsure of whether or not to vote as a result of not feeling particularly confident about either candidate, it needs to be said that sitting on the sidelines doesn’t make you a better person.

I myself was quite confident at one point that I would not be voting in the upcoming election. It had been said to me time and time again that it was my “duty as an American citizen to vote,” or “vote for the lesser of the two evils.” But what happens when you truly have no idea what the lesser of two evils might be?

In fact, inaction is still action. By not voting, you decrease the size of the voting population as a whole, therefore increasing the weight other individual’s voices hold, and consequentially diminishing the power of your own.

According to Tab polls, 1 in 10 young people who voted to leave the EU in the recent vote in Britain regret their decision. Despite over 60% of the younger generation wanting to say, the majority vote to leave overruled as a result of younger people failing to cast their votes in polls, and letting older generations voice their opinions for the fate of the country.

It is uncertainty that drives people not to cast a vote for a specific candidate. However, it is this same uncertainty that is to blame for Brexit. In addition to failing to hit the polls, many younger votes didn’t even truly understand what they were voting for, allowing influence solely from media sources to shape their decisions.

The lesson we have to learn here is that even if a majority of the populations feels a certain way, it means nothing if they don’t vote.

This lack of knowledge in terms of Brexit parallels the United States presidential election – thousands of people go to the polls every year knowing either very little, or simply bits and pieces of biased information portrayed to them in the media.

Don’t let this person be you. Go out and do your research – know what the primary issues are for the upcoming election, and know where each candidate stands. Don’t rely on the media as your primary source of information. Instead, go out and do your own research.

Websites such as procon.org, ontheissues.org, and The New York Times generally tend to be good sources of unbiased information. Look for information as neutral as possible, and try to make an educated decision for the benefit of our nation as a whole and future generations to come.

Learn from Brexit — head out to the polls and know that every vote counts, regardless of how insignificant it may seem to you at the time.