Voting is nearly pointless on a national level.
Sure, you can vote for your guy and hope he wins, but ultimately, there is no point to it because your vote isn’t even a whisper when you consider the scale of how big things really are.
For one thing, your vote on a national scale is really just a drop in the bucket, at best. When you consider that the House of Representatives is one representative per roughly 700,000 people, you have to know that your Congressperson does not give a flying rat’s ass if he or she loses your vote. Therefore the only thing that would influence your representative is money. And most Americans do not have the time or resources to truly influence their representative in the House.
In the Senate, the situation is much worse. The representation ratios are much higher in most states with each Senator representing millions in most cases. Worse still, because they have the longest terms of any elected official on the national level, they enjoy the short-term memories of the common voter, who doesn’t even bother to remember what their Senator voted on years earlier. On top of that, they require even more money for campaigning, since they have to focus on the entire State, and thus they require lots of donations from even more people. And you can bet that much of that money does not necessarily come from the constituents they represent.
For the Presidency, you have even worse odds. This past election, we saw Mitt Romney lose to Barack Obama by a little over 2 million votes. However, Romney lost the electoral votes by about 100, out of 535 electoral votes. The ratio between the popular vote and the electoral votes seems to be a bit off this time around. In 2000, if you ignore all judiciary drama that went on, you’d note that George W. Bush won the Electoral college by 5 electoral votes but lost the popular vote by a little over half a million votes. If the electoral college was operating as it should be in theory, shouldn’t that ratio between electoral votes versus popular votes be a little closer for the past election?
On top of that, the attitude of Congress and the Presidency is to pass laws and have the people prove them to be illegitimate based on what the United States Constitution says. In other words, Congress and the President can pass any law they want and it is legal, until it is overturned by the Supreme Court or one of the Inferior Courts. The trouble is, the justices on those courts are handpicked by the President and approved by the Senate, usually just a formality. So we have a judiciary that is populated by people who are more than likely to rubber stamp the legislation that is passed by Congress, a body largely voted into office by huge collectives, not individuals. Ultimately, every knowledgeable voter seems to accept that the rulings of the Supreme Court are final, regardless of the fact that they don’t have the final say so.
To top it off, the Federal government marks just about every single document, memo, or e-mail it writes as classified in some way. This presents another kind of problem: how can a voter make the correct decision when we don’t even know what the Federal government is doing to begin with? You begin to see why both parties resort to social issues, largely because most other issues would require disclosure of “sensitive” data to the public.
The mere fact that our Republic or representative democracy as it were, has anything to hide should be the smoking gun that the educated masses should look into. Yet for some reason, everyone accepts that the government needs to keep its secrets, and assumes that nothing sinister is going on. The old saying during World War 2 was that loose lips sink ships, yet for the life of me I doubt that loose lips in the United States would let the Japanese know where our ships were, despite the distant involved and the fact that ships move around all the time.
The bottom line: voting in national elections probably doesn’t you much good. The mathematics behind it mean that you don’t have the say that you think you do, regardless whatever political affiliations you have. In addition, you have very limited knowledge of what the Federal government is really doing, unless you have the right security clearances and even then you have to sift through millions of documents and files in order to get a good grip on what is going on.
The best thing you can do when it comes to voting on a national scale is to simply write your own name in or not vote at all.