The Vote Is in

Let me start by saying, for those of you who know me, you know I am NOT a political guy. I try not to get in to conversations about politics. The main reason being, I just don’t follow them well enough to be able to carry on a conversation about them at anything more in depth than a superficial level. With that said, read on.

Obviously since I’m writing this on the last Thursday in October, the vote isn’t over yet. It won’t be done until late on Tuesday, but my vote is officially in. For the second election in a row I went out at lunch time and headed to the outlet mall right by my office. We got there and there was absolutely ZERO line. We walked right up, showed our voter registration packets, got scanned in and we were in the polling booths in less than a minute. A few minutes after that, I was out the other side and heading to the food court with me fresh “I Voted” sticker on my chest. Total time from start to finish: roughly 5 minutes. If you miss out on the early voting, I’m pretty certain you aren’t going to be getting in and out of any polling place in under 5 minutes on Tuesday.

So, if I’m not a political guy, why do I bother going out and voting early? Well, the truth is, I think it’s VERY important that everybody gets out and votes. It sounds funny for me to say that, but it’s true. The way I see it, if you don’t go out and vote, you shouldn’t complain about the way things are being run. Period.

I myself don’t vote on very many of the races on the ballot. Again, this is because I just don’t know enough about the issue, the candidates, their policies on issues, etc. So, as a non-political guy, how do I go about choosing who I’m going to vote for when it comes to our President? A friend sent me a link to a site called glassbooth.org. It helps match you up with the candidate best suited for you based on the issues that matter to you. You are given 20 points and you spread them out across the issues and then it asks you some questions about each issue. When it finally gives you the results it will tell you the percentage of a match you are for each candidate and it provides links to news articles, video clips and other information where each candidate spoke about the issues at hand. For a guy like me who doesn’t know much about it, I found the site to be very helpful.

So if you get a chance, vote early. You only have tomorrow to do it. If you miss out on the early vote, BE SURE to get out and vote on Tuesday. It’s important and it’s worth your time.