wise voter essay

September 1, 2016

4 Ways to Be a Better Voter

Get informed and make better choices—or maybe you shouldn’t vote at all

By Sunny Sea Gold

Some pundits say that this election has turned everything we thought we knew about U.S. politics on its head. I tend to agree more with those who note that divisiveness and bombastic attacks have always been a part of presidential races. Consider the election of 1800, when the campaigns of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson traded accusations that one had a “hideous hermaphroditical character” and the other was “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” What does feel different this election cycle is the level of emotion stirred up among voters. Violence at rallies; protests galore; families at one another's throats on Facebook. (Or is that just my family?) Strong emotion doesn't always make for good decisions. It's time to take a deep breath, clear our heads and learn how to cast our votes well .

#1 Don't just go with your gut. Voting well means making your choice from a standpoint of informed consideration and with an eye toward the common good, says Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown University and author of The Ethics of Voting . “Suppose you go to a doctor and ask for advice about an illness—you'd expect the doctor to have your interests at heart and to think rationally about your symptoms,” he says. “Voters owe the same thing to each other and the electorate. Vote for everyone's best interest, and when you're forming your political beliefs, form them based on information and learning, not on the basis of quick thinking, anger or bias.” That can be tough to do, however, because a good politician knows exactly how to push our emotional buttons, says Leslie Shore, a communications expert who teaches effective listening at St. Mary's University of Minnesota: “Word choice can be very specifically used to induce a response in the listener.” Strong emotion, however, can interfere with our ability to think critically.

#2 Don't get all your news from social media. Most of us have unfollowed, unfriended or muted contacts on Facebook, Twitter and other networks because their political views make us mad. Doing so can give rise to narrowed political views and groupthink, Shore warns. “Most of our social media networks are full of people who agree with us, so they create an automatic validation of everything that you're already thinking,” she says. “If no one challenges you, there's no opportunity to rethink or ask important questions.” Try broadening your news sources by tuning to channels or sites, papers or magazines that have a different slant than you do. “If you have a news app on your smartphone or tablet, specifically add a publication to your feed that you know tends to lean the opposite way, and then do yourself a favor and actually read what they're saying,” Shore says.

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#3 Watch the next debate with your eyes closed. A recent study by Joan Y. Chiao, then at Northwestern University, a founder of the new field of cultural neuroscience, found that voters perceive male candidates as more competent and dominant than female ones, based on facial features alone. What's more, voters of both genders tend to prefer physically attractive female candidates, whereas attractiveness doesn't matter for male ones. Most of us like to think that we won't let outdated gender stereotypes affect our vote, but it's worth a self-check anyhow.

#4 Know when to abstain. I have a confession to make: I didn't vote in the presidential primaries. I'm not used to the mail-in ballots in my adopted home state of Oregon, and I sent mine in too late to be counted. Looking back, I think perhaps it was for the best: I'd been waffling for months about which candidate to choose and hadn't taken the time to firmly ground my choice in facts and information. “We've found that having more information changes people's policy preferences,” Brennan says. “We can specifically predict what the American public likely would choose if it were better informed.” But political science studies have found that a majority of Americans are ignorant of some pretty basic political knowledge such as actual trends in crime or unemployment or whether the economy is doing well or not. You can think of casting a “bad” vote as being a bit like air pollution, he says. “If you drive an inefficient car and pollute a lot, your individual contribution isn't that big of a deal. But if we all do that, it is . ” Not everyone may agree with the idea that a good citizen should abstain from voting if he or she can't cast a “good” vote, but it resonates with me. Here's hoping we take our responsibility to heart and endeavor to do our civic duty well.

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Opinion: Voting—and Voting Wisely—Are Acts of Practical Wisdom in Society

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School Education /

Essay on Voting for School Students: Samples in 150, 200, and 250 Words

Updated on
Feb 15, 2024

Essay on Voting: Voting is a powerful tool for any democratic country. The act of voting not only helps the candidate to build a nation by making laws and implementing them, but the active participation of voters in the democratic process also ensures active participation in nation-building.

Similarly theme for the year 2024 National Voters Day is ´Nothing Like Voting, I Vote for Sure’ aims to raise awareness about voting, encouraging eligible candidates to register for the nation, building responsibility, and actively participating in the process of democracy.

Table of Contents

1 Essay on Voting in 150 Words
2 Essay on Voting in 200 words
3 Essay on Voting in 250 words:

Also Read: One Nation One Election Essay in 500 Words

Essay on Voting in 150 Words

Voting plays an important role in a democratic country. For the citizens of a democracy, voting is more than a civic duty; in fact, it is a powerful expression of the thoughts and hopes of the general public.

Through the right to vote, the voting behaviour of a citizen in a country actively participates in shaping the future and influences the policies that are made or are still to be drafted for the welfare of the people. In a voting method, the citizens of a country elect representatives who align with their values. Altogether, voting gives the right to subjects that empower and encourage a sense of responsibility and help in engagement with the community.

Moreover, it should be understood that the impact of each vote resonates beyond the electronic voting machines or ballot boxes. In reality, voting shapes the course of the nation and ensures a government that recognises the alternate visions and aspirations of the general public.

Essay on Voting in 200 words

The behaviour of voters plays an important role in running elections and in shaping the country’s democracy. Among the many key determinants of understanding voting behaviour is the voter´s socio-economic background. Every human needs financial assistance to live; therefore, choosing monetary benefits as the priority is not incorrect in any way. To earn, we need employment opportunities, control of inflation, and a boom in economic development. All these three key ingredients make up one of the mindsets of voters towards selecting the type of government they want. The areas experiencing good growth regarding the economy as well as job opportunities may witness the support of the voters for the ruling party in the future, while the areas facing challenges may lean towards failure.

Moreover, caste and community also play an important role in aligning the candidates in the minds of voters. Apart from economic development and casteism, the political agendas and manifestos of political parties also help in shaping the voter’s behaviour. In between all of these, how can we forget the role of the media in building the perception of public opinion?

Voter behaviour in voting is a complex interaction where understanding socio-economic factors, media influence, political ideologies, and leadership qualities not only marks success for the political parties but also for building a strong nation as per voters´ voting desire.

Also Read: Speech on President of India for School Students in English

Essay on Voting in 250 words:

The Indian system of voting follows a parliamentary democracy in which the people elect representatives to a parliament, and they make laws for them. The Indian electoral system in India is designed to ensure the representation and participation of citizens while they choose their representatives. The entire process of voting involves many steps, which begin from the registration of voters to the actual casting of votes.

In the first stage, eligible citizens who are over the age of 18 must register themselves as voters. Then they have to submit their necessary documents, which include proof of identity and address, to the Election Commission of India. Once the candidates are registered with the Election Commission of India, they receive their identification card, also called a voter ID card.

The political parties nominate the candidates, and citizens vote for their favourite candidate. The contender who gets the highest number of votes in the constituency wins and represents the legislative body.

In the whole process of elections in India, the Election Commission makes sure that the voting process is fair and transparent throughout the electoral process. Moreover, it is also made sure that people should be able to use EVM, which is another replacement for traditional paper ballots.

The people of India trust the Constitution as well as the authorities that help them elect their representatives. Furthermore, the Election Commission also runs voter awareness campaigns and proxy voting methods, which contribute to the fairness of elections in India.

Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with educational and informative content expertise. She has hands-on experience in Education, Study Abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and analysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particularly in the education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs related to her field to expand her expertise further. In her personal life, she loves creative writing and aspires to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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Why Voting Is Important

“Voting is your civic duty.” This is a pretty common sentiment, especially each November as Election Day approaches. But what does it really mean? And what does it mean for Americans in particular?

Social Studies, Civics, U.S. History

Americans Voting

Typically in the United States, national elections draw large numbers of voters compared to local elections.

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A History of Voting in the United States Today, most American citizens over the age of 18 are entitled to vote in federal and state elections , but voting was not always a default right for all Americans. The United States Constitution, as originally written, did not define specifically who could or could not vote—but it did establish how the new country would vote. Article 1 of the Constitution determined that members of the Senate and House of Representatives would both be elected directly by popular vote . The president, however, would be elected not by direct vote, but rather by the Electoral College . The Electoral College assigns a number of representative votes per state, typically based on the state’s population. This indirect election method was seen as a balance between the popular vote and using a state’s representatives in Congress to elect a president. Because the Constitution did not specifically say who could vote, this question was largely left to the states into the 1800s. In most cases, landowning white men were eligible to vote, while white women, black people, and other disadvantaged groups of the time were excluded from voting (known as disenfranchisement ).

While no longer explicitly excluded, voter suppression is a problem in many parts of the country. Some politicians try to win re election by making it harder for certain populations and demographics to vote. These politicians may use strategies such as reducing polling locations in predominantly African American or Lantinx neighborhoods, or only having polling stations open during business hours, when many disenfranchised populations are working and unable to take time off. It was not until the 15th Amendment was passed in 1869 that black men were allowed to vote. But even so, many would-be voters faced artificial hurdles like poll taxes , literacy tests, and other measures meant to discourage them from exercising their voting right. This would continue until the 24th Amendment in 1964, which eliminated the poll tax , and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended Jim Crow laws. Women were denied the right to vote until 1920, when the long efforts of the women’s suffrage movement resulted in the 19th Amendment. With these amendments removing the previous barriers to voting (particularly sex and race), theoretically all American citizens over the age of 21 could vote by the mid 1960s. Later, in 1971, the American voting age was lowered to 18, building on the idea that if a person was old enough to serve their country in the military, they should be allowed to vote. With these constitutional amendments and legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the struggle for widespread voting rights evolved from the Founding Fathers’ era to the late 20th century. Why Your Vote Matters If you ever think that just one vote in a sea of millions cannot make much of a difference, consider some of the closest elections in U.S. history. In 2000, Al Gore narrowly lost the Electoral College vote to George W. Bush. The election came down to a recount in Florida, where Bush had won the popular vote by such a small margin that it triggered an automatic recount and a Supreme Court case ( Bush v. Gore ). In the end, Bush won Florida by 0.009 percent of the votes cast in the state, or 537 votes. Had 600 more pro-Gore voters gone to the polls in Florida that November, there may have been an entirely different president from 2000–2008. More recently, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by securing a close Electoral College win. Although the election did not come down to a handful of votes in one state, Trump’s votes in the Electoral College decided a tight race. Clinton had won the national popular vote by nearly three million votes, but the concentration of Trump voters in key districts in “swing” states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan helped seal enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Your vote may not directly elect the president, but if your vote joins enough others in your voting district or county, your vote undoubtedly matters when it comes to electoral results. Most states have a “winner take all” system where the popular vote winner gets the state’s electoral votes. There are also local and state elections to consider. While presidential or other national elections usually get a significant voter turnout, local elections are typically decided by a much smaller group of voters. A Portland State University study found that fewer than 15 percent of eligible voters were turning out to vote for mayors, council members, and other local offices. Low turnout means that important local issues are determined by a limited group of voters, making a single vote even more statistically meaningful. How You Can Make Your Voice Heard If you are not yet 18, or are not a U.S. citizen, you can still participate in the election process. You may not be able to walk into a voting booth, but there are things you can do to get involved:

Be informed! Read up on political issues (both local and national) and figure out where you stand.
Get out and talk to people. Even if you cannot vote, you can still voice opinions on social media, in your school or local newspaper, or other public forums. You never know who might be listening.
Volunteer. If you support a particular candidate, you can work on their campaign by participating in phone banks, doing door-to-door outreach, writing postcards, or volunteering at campaign headquarters. Your work can help get candidates elected, even if you are not able to vote yourself.

Participating in elections is one of the key freedoms of American life. Many people in countries around the world do not have the same freedom, nor did many Americans in centuries past. No matter what you believe or whom you support, it is important to exercise your rights.

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Related Resources

Power to the people: An in-depth look on voter’s education

The power to vote is not enough; one must also be smart on how they chose their preferred candidates.

Post author By Bea Cruz , Marie Angeli Peña , Isabelle Santiago
Post date November 14, 2021
No Comments on Power to the people: An in-depth look on voter’s education

The Philippines is slowly crawling toward the 2022 national elections. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are more than prepared. Ranking last in the Nikkei Asia COVID-19 Recovery Index, the people are clear to let the next leaders of our country know that it’s time to get the work done. But it’s imperative for people to know which candidates should be put in charge of it.

However, we’ve seen this time and time again. Frustrated citizens select a candidate who pretentiously promises change—only to fall back into the chasms of corruption, injustice, and poverty. This system goes on in circles; thus, we never really learn from falling for the strategic system that lures us with grandiose promises. Still, that doesn’t stop advocates from letting the masses know how to vote smarter and wiser.

No calm before the storm

Politically charged arguments on social media can be clear indicators that the national elections are on the horizon. Among these arguments lie a singular, often overused insult: bobotante . While the regular Filipino netizen may be desensitized to the contemptuous remark, its very existence calls into question its validity and most of all, its substance.

To Cleve Arguelles, an assistant prof. lecturer from the Department of Political Science and Development Studies, bobotante bears no merit in its form or usage. He stresses that it only serves to alienate the voters from one another, where “it shames them and maligns them just because they’re voting the other way.”

Genevieve Giron (II, BS BIO-MED), a first-time registered voter in the upcoming elections, echoes the sentiment by calling the term “inappropriate and derogatory.” Although she recognizes that some voters choose to stay ignorant of the political atmosphere, there is no sufficient rhyme or reason for calling someone a bobotante . “It is usually used to shoot down voters who vote for what the collective population [deems] as ‘unqualified’ candidates,” she stresses.

Arguelles emphasizes that characterizing voters as a bobotante for choosing the opposing candidate or party is no longer democratic in a system where the citizens’ votes should be fair. “It’s [our] motivations, our desires, and our interests [that drive the reason] we vote for certain candidates—it’s equally valid as others’ [own reasons],” he expounds.

In fact, there is a myriad of factors that shape one’s motivations behind voting. Some might conduct extended research on a candidate’s platforms; others may simply observe if the candidate is able to extend basic services to local communities. Arguelles asserts that although these justifications may belong to quite different ends of the spectrum, both are nonetheless valid. “I think the challenge when we say that other voters are bobotante is that it shuts down the conversation instead of enriching it in terms of why other people vote that way,” he reasons.

Nakaligo ka na ba sa dagat ng basura?

But for the most part, the people would look at a different quality for their chosen leaders: fame. This is further emphasized by their political campaign starter pack: a catchy campaign jingle, a charismatic personality, excessive publicity materials, and most importantly, a familiar surname.

Arguelles cites that the absence of strong institutionalized political parties in the country is why Filipinos have the tendency to vote based on personality. “For people to consider you as their candidate, kailangan kilala ka nila ,” he suggests. Thus, he believes that people “reduce the cost of making an informed vote” by only focusing on their names, their taglines, and their jingles as information shortcuts.

(For people to consider you as their candidate, you have to be memorable.)

Privilege and elitism also play a huge role in voting decisions. “In many communities of poor voters, the question that they would usually ask is, ‘ Sino bang nakapagpadala ng services and goods in this community?’” Arguelles mentions. When it comes to other aspects, however, it becomes a different story. “They couldn’t afford to vote on the basis of principles or programs…because they don’t have the privilege of doing that, especially if the government isn’t well-placed in providing these services to all of its citizens.”

(In many communities of poor voters, the question that they would usually ask is, “Who gives services and goods in this community?”)

Giron conveys that she values candidates who are willing to speak up for those who cannot. A person in government must be able to “lead, serve, and fight not only for the people, but with the Filipino people.” Meanwhile, Denise Li (II, BS BIO-MED) is quick to remind candidates that they must not run to achieve power, but instead “to work for the people.”

Problems in our solution

While voter’s education is built with good intentions, it is time to question its effectiveness—or rather, its impact on the overall electoral initiatives. Perhaps the solution is also part of the problem.

Arguelles argues that there is a neglected issue of “over-focusing on voter’s education and centralizing all our resources and energies on that.” He explains that it potentially loses sight of what plagues elections. “The problem is that [voter’s education] does not recognize the problems in our electoral system design.” Further, he mentions that educating voters becomes more strenuous because the country’s electoral systems aren’t favorable to the democratic nature that voting should inherently have.

Instead of pinning the blame on voters, “We have to shift the burden on the Comelec (Commission on Elections) and other election authorities,” Arguelles asserts. He suggests that improvements must be made on the elections themselves; if an outdated system only comforts the powerful, it is evident which sector is favored and which is undermined.

For example, he clamors for the regulation of online campaigns, which is further burdened by rampant disinformation online. Without proper control, “it’s becoming more innovative and sophisticated in every election cycle.”

Consequently, access to improper information channels becomes part of the problem. Despite being well-versed in technology, Li herself admits, “Super dali ako madala ng fake news.” This burden is even heavier on voters who suffer from the digital divide—lacking gadgets and digital skills—while also being unfamiliar with digesting information online.

(It is very easy for me to be swayed by fake news.)

It goes without saying that stepping into the minefield that is politics is not for everyone. It requires a certain level of grit and steel for a person to be competent in understanding these political systems. But if reliance on personality is the sole factor for choosing our heads of state, it could bring the nation into a downward spiral.

In the end, every citizen must remind themselves that they are choosing a candidate who is saddled with the responsibility of carrying the country on their backs. One vote can change the tides toward a better system, and then perhaps a better future.

By Bea Cruz

By Marie Angeli Peña

By Isabelle Santiago

If you care about social impact, why is voting important?

Your civic duty isn't the only reason your vote matters.

By Robert Wiblin · Published October 2020

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Introduction
1 Why is voting important? It’s not just about civic duty.
2 The probability of one vote changing an election
3 Governments are so large which raises the expected value of voting
4 What if you’re wrong?
5 Is deciding how to vote too much effort?
6 How much does it cost to drive one extra vote?
7 Overall, is it altruistic to vote?

Could one vote — your vote — swing an entire election? Most of us abandoned this seeming fantasy not too long after we learned how elections work.

But the chances are higher than you might think. If you’re in a competitive district in a competitive election, the odds that your vote will flip a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million.

That’s a very small probability, but it’s big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it’s big relative to the enormous impact governments can have on the world.

Each four years the United States federal government allocates $17,500,000,000,000, so a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome of a US national election gives an average American some degree of influence over $1.75 million.

That means the expected importance of voting — the probability of changing an election’s result multiplied by the impact if you do — might, depending on your personal circumstances, be very high.

This could, in itself, be a good argument for voting.

Fortunately there is a significant amount of academic research on the importance of elections and how likely one vote is to change the outcome, so I’ve pulled it together to estimate the average value of one vote for the right person.

The answer, as you might expect, depends a great deal on the circumstances of any given election, and indeed most votes predictably have no impact.

But there are common situations in which the expected value of casting a vote will be far higher than anything else you could hope to do in the same amount of time.

Why exactly? Let me explain.

Table of Contents

Why is voting important? It’s not just about civic duty.

In this article, we’ll demonstrate that, for many people, voting is important, but not (or at least not only) because of the normal arguments about it being your civic duty.

Your vote could actually change the world for the better, and if you’re in a competitive race the chances are high enough that you should think hard about hitting the voting booth.

First I’ll investigate the two key things that determine the impact of your vote:

The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome in a range of different situations
How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others

Then I’ll discuss what I think are the best arguments against the importance of voting elections:

If an election is competitive, that means other people disagree about which option is better, and you’re at some risk of voting for the worse candidate by mistake.
While voting itself doesn’t take long, knowing enough to accurately pick which candidate is better for the world actually does take substantial effort — effort that could be better allocated elsewhere.

Finally we’ll look into the impact of donating to campaigns or working to ‘get out the vote’, which can be effective ways to generate additional votes for your preferred candidate.

We’ll use figures for United States presidential elections, because they have an unusually large impact on our priority problems , more of our readers are American citizens than any other single nationality, and more work has been done to model them than other kinds of elections. However, similar reasoning can be applied to elections in other countries.

The probability of one vote changing an election

Given how infrequently national elections are won by one vote, we can’t just look at the historical record and observe the fraction for which that’s true. While we do have examples of large tied elections , there’ll never be enough real-life elections to accurately determine their frequency empirically.

We need a different approach: statistical modelling.

To see how the method works, we can start small. Imagine that you’re on a small committee making a decision. The odds that you’ll change the outcome of a vote like that — assuming 2 options and 4 other voters, each 50% likely to vote for either option — is about 19% . We could confirm that empirically if we liked.

We can then work upwards to the size of national elections: with 8 voters it’s 14% , with 16 voters it’s about 10%, with 32 voters about 7%, and so on. In fact, the likelihood you’ll change the outcome ends up being roughly proportional to one over the square root of the number of voters.

Statisticians who specialise in politics add real polling data to the mix, and compare it to actual election results to figure out how accurately polling predicts how people will vote. This gives them a ‘probability distribution’ for the likelihood that each elector will choose to vote for each candidate.

With all of this information in hand, we can go ahead and model tens of billions of elections to estimate how often the entire result will be changed by a single vote.

The famous statistician Andrew Gelman of Columbia University has done just this for US presidential elections, which are broken down into states, and has published several papers outlining the results. 1 2

He found that if you’re in a ‘safe state’ like California, the odds of your vote changing the outcome of a presidential election really is effectively zero (the model spits out 1 in 100 trillion, but it’s very hard to assign meaningful probabilities to something so unlikely). Something similar would be true for voters in ‘very safe seats’ in the UK or Australia.

By contrast, in a small US state polling around 50/50 in a close election nationally — for instance New Mexico, Iowa, or New Hampshire in the 2000 elections — the probability could get as high as 1 in 3 million. (The article Vote for Charity’s Sake offers a nice overview of this research, and we’ve stuck some details in this footnote.)

In a wider range of ‘tipping point states’ in reasonably close elections, the probability is lower, and closer to 1 in 10 million.

(Note that what matters isn’t the state in which polling is closest, but rather the states that might put someone over the edge of winning the election as a whole — the ‘tipping point state’. If one candidate is ahead nationally then they’ll probably be ahead in the ‘tipping point state’ too.)

As of October 14 2020, Joe Biden’s substantial lead in public opinion polls means Gelman’s modelling indicates that there are only four states where the odds of one vote changing the outcome is greater than 1 in 10 million: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. 3

However, a perhaps unexpected finding is that even when an election doesn’t look that close, the probability of one vote changing the outcome in a potential ‘tipping point state’ rarely falls to less than half of what it would be in a close-seeming election. This is shown visually in the figure below from FiveThirtyEight’s election modelling. The underlying reason is that opinion polls are often off by a large margin, so when an election is close on election day we can’t rule out that it will be a blow-out for one side — and, similarly, even when a candidate seems to be substantially ahead, we can’t confidently rule out the election being close.

Is voting important? We can look at simulations to see how likely your vote is to matter. Here is a 538 simulation of Electoral College outcomes for the 2020 American Presidential Election.

In the UK or Australia, an equivalent analysis would look at the likelihood that a party gains a majority in parliament by one seat, and that that seat is won by one vote.

The factors that push up the leverage of each voter are:

An election being close to 50/50 nationally
An election being close to 50/50 in a given ‘tipping point’ seat or voting region
Being able to accurately determine which elections are closest
Being able to accurately identify which seats or regions are closest (in which case expected influence becomes concentrated in those places)
Fewer total voters

Australia has a tenth as many voters as the US, and the UK has a fifth — which, all else equal, would make each vote 2-3x more likely to flip the outcome of a close election. 4 Polling is similarly precise in all of these different countries. And the likely ‘tipping point’ seats in US, UK and Australian elections all contain a similar fraction of the population — 10 to 20% — so power is concentrated in a similarly-sized subset of voters.

So from the above we can anticipate that in a similarly tight election, in a ‘tipping point seat’, the odds of a vote changing the outcome would be a few times higher in those countries than in the US.

A similar analysis can be applied to any sort of election.

A common objection to this line of reasoning is that if an election is as close as one vote, it will be re-run or decided by the courts anyway, and so a single vote can never actually make a difference.

To see how this is mistaken, you need to conceptualise the vote margin in large elections as shifting the probability of each candidate winning. If you’re ahead, each extra vote makes you more likely to win without a court battle or a re-run. And if you’re narrowly behind, each extra vote increases your chances of successfully disputing the result. So long as we’re unsure what the vote margin will be, the expected impact of each extra vote remains the same as it would be if all its impact were entirely concentrated on a perfectly tied election.

Finally, there’s another quite different way one can model the impact that each vote has, but it won’t much change our conclusion, so for simplicity I’ll leave it in this footnote. 5

Alright, now that we have a sense of the likelihood of swinging an election, we need to know how valuable it would be to do so.

Governments are so large which raises the expected value of voting

Compared to the likelihood of a vote changing the outcome of an election, how much it matters who wins i) is harder to quantify, ii) depends more on your values, and iii) varies widely depending on the candidates running for office. But a quick scan of the numbers and issues at stake suggests that the impact will often be substantial.

In most rich countries, governments tax and spend 25-55% of a country’s GDP. As a rule of thumb, you can roughly think of them as directing a third of a country’s income.

That’s enough money per person, and per vote, that positively influencing how it’s spent can be important enough to offset the low chances of any given vote swinging an election.

Again using US to illustrate, over the next four years 6 the US federal government will spend about $17.5 trillion .

Written out as a number it looks like $17,500,000,000,000. That’s $53,000 for each American, or $129,000 for each vote cast in 2016.

If you multiply all that spending through a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome, in a swing state like New Hampshire, it comes to $1.75 million. That’s the fraction of the budget you might ‘expect’ to influence by voting in a swing state, in the statistical sense of expectation .

If that number sounds unexpectedly large, remember that we’re shifting around roughly a third of the economy’s output, over several years, and we’re concentrating on the impact a voter can have if they’re among the privileged 20% of the country that lives in a state which can plausibly determine the election outcome.

In the US’s state-based system, 80% of eligible voters can’t hope to change the outcome — but that leaves the remaining 20% with 5 times the leverage they’d have otherwise.

Of course, much of the US federal budget is quite stable, but keep in mind that stickiness in how money gets spent cuts both ways: it makes it harder to shift the budget, but if you do, it means those changes will probably stay around for longer.

It’s common for parties to want to shift how several percent of GDP gets spent. But the budget doesn’t even have to be that flexible for your impact to matter.

For example, if one party will spend 0.5% of GDP on foreign aid, and the other will spend 0.3%, a vote with a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome would shift — in expectation — $17,800 into foreign aid.

There are other kinds of government spending that can have huge impacts as well: R&D into new clean energy technologies is probably one of the most cost-effective ways to limit climate change, and think about the enormous return the world is getting from countries like the UK that decided, years ago, to fund preliminary research into coronavirus vaccines.

But choosing which taxes to impose and how to spend the money raised is just one thing the government does, one which happens to be easy to quantify in dollar terms.

There are major non-budgetary impacts as well, which include:

Foreign policy: Elected governments decide things such as how much to trade with foreigners (which can affect their wellbeing too), how much to raise tensions with other countries in pursuit of foreign policy goals, and ultimately whether to go to war. Foreign policy is often determined without a lot of input from legislatures, which means a few elected officials have substantial discretion — and that’s especially important for countries with large militaries or nuclear weapons.
Stabilising the business cycle: Governments work to raise total spending during recessions and decrease total spending when inflation is too high, in order to limit excessive ups and downs in the economy.
Regulations: Elected governments make decisions about all sorts of regulations, for instance on consumer products, workplace conditions, environmental standards, and so on.
Immigration: Elected governments decide how many foreigners can come live in a country and on what basis, ranging from skilled migrants, to economic migrants, to political refugees.
Social freedoms: Elected governments can influence whether LGBTQ+ people can be public about their sexual orientation and whether they can get married, which recreational drugs people are free to use, how police go about enforcing laws, whether voluntary euthanasia is permitted, and so on.
Political freedom: Elected governments can try to entrench themselves, or reduce the ability of the public to reflect on political questions, by harassing political opponents, being generally misleading, shutting down hostile media outlets, or making it harder for people to vote.

Measuring the social impact of the different approaches governments might take to these issues is difficult. But it could easily be more important than the shifts in spending that result from a change in government.

To illustrate, imagine that you think the chance of a nuclear war over four years under one presidential candidate is 1 in 1,000, and the chance with the other is 1 in 500. While highly uncertain, these probabilities are both figures nuclear security specialists might give if you asked them about the likelihood of nuclear war. How valuable would it be to vote for the safer leader?

To answer this, we can think about how much society would be willing to pay to avoid a nuclear war. It’s really hard to estimate, but let’s spitball it and say that each US resident would be willing to pay $1 million to avoid dying in a nuclear war, on average. (For comparison, the US government will spend about $7 million or so to save a life.) A total nuclear war would kill around 80% of the US population. 7 If you do the math, then a vote with a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the election outcome would be worth $25,000 to your fellow citizens through its effects on the likelihood of a nuclear war alone. And a nuclear war would obviously also affect people overseas, as well as untold future generations.

The policies which are most impactful are not always the most salient. George W. Bush’s famous choice to pursue the Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein, though at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and trillions of dollars in spending. 8 But President Bush also dramatically raised US spending on antiviral drugs for impoverished victims of HIV in Africa. This ‘PEPFAR’ program probably would not have been pursued in his absence, and likely prevented several million deaths .

Though the above is not a systematic survey, and some examples are atypical, to me they suggest that the outcome of elections will often have significant consequences.

Of course, not every election is that important. Sometimes all the candidates likely to win an election are similarly good overall, or if one of them is better it’s hard to figure out which it is.

In particular, within some electoral systems — for instance those with compulsory voting and electoral candidates chosen by politicians or party professionals — the tendency for parties to strategically bunch together in the middle of the political spectrum is strong.

More stark differences tend to arise in places with low voter turnout, few checks on executive power, plurality voting along with more than 2 viable candidates, and party primaries in which only the most motivated voters participate. In those elections the differences between candidates tend to be larger, meaning it’s more often important for the right group to win, and it’s easier to tell which group that is.

What if you’re wrong?

So far I’ve argued that voting can represent a great opportunity for social impact if:

You’re in a close district in a close election
There is a noticeable difference in the desirability of different candidates winning

But there’s a sophisticated argument against this view:

You can only swing an election if roughly as many people are voting for the outcome you prefer as the outcome you oppose. But if the public as a whole is roughly split down the middle, why should you trust your own judgement on the matter? Sure, you’ve looked into it and think that your view is right. But so have many other voters and about half of them still disagree with you. So because there’s no principled reason to trust your judgement over that of others, even after doing your political research you should still think you’re only about 50% likely to be voting the right way.

This is an application of the case for epistemic modesty , and it has some bite. If you think half of your fellow voters are getting things wrong, why should you think you’re getting it right?

This uncertainty about whether you’re truly voting the right way reduces the expected value of voting. If you had no confidence at all in your judgement — in other words, if you thought you were as likely to be wrong as you were to be right — the expected value would fall all the way to zero.

However, to go as far as that this case for intellectual modesty requires that other voters be your ‘epistemic peers’ — basically that they be as smart, informed, honest, and motivated as you. And there are a number of reasons you might think you can cast a ballot more wisely and altruistically than average.

First, the level of information most voters have about politics and policy is quite low. Some typical examples in the US, taken from Ilya Somin’s 2013 book Democracy and Political Ignorance include:

“A survey before the 2014 election … found that only 38 percent of Americans knew that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives at the time, and the same number knew that the Democrats had a majority in the Senate. Not knowing which party controls these institutions makes it difficult for voters to assign credit or blame for their performance.”

“For years, there has been an ongoing debate over the future of federal spending… Yet a 2014 survey found that only 20 percent of Americans realize that the federal government spends more money on Social Security than on foreign aid, transportation, and interest on the government debt. Some 33 percent believe that foreign aid is the biggest item on this list, even though it is actually the smallest, amounting to about one percent of the federal budget, compared with 17 percent for Social Security.”

“In 1964, in the midst of the Cold War, only 38 percent were aware that the Soviet Union was not a member of the U.S-led NATO alliance.”

This should not be surprising and in my view is no reason to think poorly of your fellow citizens. People have jobs to do, family members to take care of, and personal projects to pursue. For most folks, following the ins and outs of policy debates is neither easy nor rewarding, and because they don’t live in close districts it’s not the best way for them to improve the world, either. On top of that, following the news can be bad for people’s focus and mental health .

While the polling above appears dismal, there is an active academic debate about how problematic it really is for voters to lack the basic knowledge they would seemingly need to vote wisely. The damage is partly reduced by uninformed voters making different random errors that cancel out, people using heuristics like ‘am I better off than I was four years ago’, and politicians paying attention to things voters are more likely to know (e.g. ‘I want better healthcare’) while ignoring their views on things they won’t (e.g. how best to organise a healthcare system).

Nonetheless, for our purposes the fact remains that simply looking up basic background information — like who is in government, where different parties or people stand on the issues, what experts say about those issues when surveyed, and so on — will give you a big edge over others when it comes to determining which candidate will produce better outcomes.

If you’re trying to figure out how best to treat a disease you have, it’s one thing to think you can do better than your doctor, and quite another to think you can do better than a random stranger.

Secondly, if you’ve read this article to this point, you’re likely unusually interested in figuring out which election outcome is best for the world as a whole.

But not all voters focus on that question. Some always vote for the same party as a matter of habit, without giving much thought to the expected impact on the world. Others care about which outcome is best for them and their family, or the country in which they live. Others vote to express their ideals, or their loyalty to a group, or just for fun.

If you truly aspire to vote for the outcome that is ideal for the whole world, considering everyone’s wellbeing in an impartial way, you are more likely to succeed at that goal than the many other voters who aren’t even trying.

Finally, even if it were individually rational to decide there’s no value in trying to figure out the right way to vote because of ‘epistemic modesty’, the approach would foster collective laziness — leading all voters to be less informed than they otherwise would be, and likely worsening political outcomes. That would make it strange to recommend it to you all as a general policy.

Overall, while the risk of mistakenly voting for the wrong candidate reduces the value of voting, I don’t think it reduces it dramatically — at least not in the most important cases, where the difference between your options is a stark one.

If you think your research can get you to be 75% confident about which candidate is better, that is half as valuable as being 100% confident you’re making the right decision.

Is deciding how to vote too much effort?

While we haven’t been able to place a clear dollar value on a vote in a close district in a close election, we saw that in the United States each of those votes influences more than a million dollars worth of government spending, and could have the same or greater impact in other ways.

This suggests that a vote for someone who substantially increases the value of that spending — or otherwise improves government policy — could be worth the equivalent of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to your fellow citizens.

If you divide that by the time it takes to vote — minutes in some countries, hours in others — this looks like a great opportunity to do good.

Compare it to earning money to give to the very best charity you can find: even if you assume that the organisation can turn $1 into something as valuable as giving other people in your country $100, you’d need to be able to give ~$1,000 in an hour to make it as valuable as a vote worth $100,000.

But the true cost of voting is much more than the time it takes to vote. In practice you need to do the research described above to figure out who is best to vote for. This additional effort substantially reduces the good you can do per hour.

Some people will follow politics and policy and form views about who it is best to vote for regardless. For them, figuring out how to vote is not an additional cost beyond what they are doing anyway. They may even find the process fun or energising.

But others don’t like politics and wouldn’t spend any time on it unless they felt it was their responsibility to do so. For them we can think of each hour spent deciding who to vote for as substituting for an hour of work or study that they could have otherwise directed towards improving the world.

How long does it take to decide how to vote? That will depend a lot on the election and how difficult it is to analyse the issues at stake. In some countries one party is clearly far more focused on the wellbeing of the world as a whole, or simply far more competent, than the other. But in other countries it’s legitimately hard to tell what outcome will be best.

Hypothetically, we can imagine someone who doesn’t follow politics at all between elections, and then tunes in to make a decision on who to vote for, and starts reading to try to make an informed choice. If this would require them to do the equivalent of a week’s work, it would increase the effective cost of voting 10-100 fold.

If they’re in a high-impact job already, working to solve a pressing global problem, it would be easy to see how it could be better for them to remain focused on the work in which they’re most specialised, and leave politics to others. Depending on someone’s salary, working for a week and donating the money to an effective charity could also easily be more impactful than doing research and then casting a vote.

If you’re short of time, I can think of two shortcuts you could use to quickly cast a vote that’s more likely to be for the right person than the wrong one.

The first is just to find someone you think is bright, shares your values, and follows politics more than you do, and ask them who to vote for.

The second is to look at opinion polling globally. Even if your country is split down the middle, the world as a whole might very strongly prefer one candidate, 9 which is a very important piece of information from an ‘epistemic modesty’ perspective. Foreigners don’t get to vote in other countries’ elections, but they too have preferences about the outcome, are affected by the results, and their outside perspective might even give them insights that locals are missing.

Regardless, one thing to remember is that it will be easiest to tell which candidate is best to vote for in an election in which the difference is large — and these are also the elections in which a vote is of greatest value.

Another is that political participation is open to anyone who, for one reason or another, doesn’t have an especially impactful job at the time.

It’s hard to give general advice here, because in addition to all the variables like election closeness discussed above, individual voter’s opportunity costs vary a great deal. But if I had to give a rule I would say:

If you already follow politics well enough to vote wisely (and you’d vote in a close election, etc.), it will often make sense to vote.

If you wouldn’t follow politics except in order to have a social impact, and you have the opportunity to instead spend the requisite time specialising in a high-impact job working on a pressing problem , or earning to give for effective charities, or something similar, that will often be the better option.

How much does it cost to drive one extra vote?

What if you think the outcome of an election is important enough that you want to do more than just vote yourself?

For most of us, the low hanging fruit is to contact friends and family in competitive districts, encourage them to vote, and make the case for our preferred candidate. Unsurprisingly research shows that personal appeals from friends and family have a big impact, and have 10 times or more than the effect of an appeal from a stranger.

But having exhausted your friends, you might decide you want to give money to a campaign as well. How much do you have to give to get your candidate one extra vote?

With billions of dollars spent on political advocacy in the US each year, this has been the focus of substantial research. Campaigns can randomly target ‘get out the vote’ efforts on some voters and not others, and then see how much more likely those voters are to show up.

This table from the 2015 edition of Get Out The Vote summarises the results of those sort of experiments, with the cost per vote in the final column:

Is it important to get others to vote? Here is a table of cost-effectiveness estimates of various interventions to get out the vote.

According to these studies, for those methods shown to work — such as door-knocking or phone-banking — persuading one stranger to vote for your preferred candidate costs $30-100, or a few hours of work as a volunteer.

If, having compared the candidates and the closeness of the election, you think a vote for the right person is in some sense worth thousands of dollars, that sounds pretty good. However, it has to be compared to the best alternative ways to use your money to improve the world, which may also offer a huge return on investment.

On top of that I’ve been advised by researchers I trust, who have investigated the topic in detail, that these figures are underestimates, at least for the big elections you’re most likely to follow.

That’s for multiple reasons. One is that all results in social science tend to look weaker over time as they’re scrutinised and people attempt to replicate them.

Another is that political campaigns, at least in the US, have more money for each voter they’re chasing than they did in the past. New technologies also make them better at targeting the voters most likely to be convinced. As a result, swing voters in swing states are already contacted with campaign messages again and again, reducing the impact of any further prompts.

For instance, a 2020 paper looking at TV ads in recent US presidential elections suggested a cost per vote of $100-1,000, which is probably now more typical.

However, not all campaigns are as well resourced, and the less funding they have the cheaper it’s likely to be for them to find additional supporters.

The campaigns for Joe Biden and Donald Trump, along with allied groups, are likely to have about $30 per voter in potential tipping point states. Both have set new fundraising records for presidential campaigns. 10

But the Biden campaign had just a tenth as much — $3 per voter — in the 2020 Democratic primaries through Super Tuesday (after which the primaries began to wind down).

That difference is even starker when you consider that a much larger fraction of voters are open to switching their support in primary elections than in general elections (though keep in mind the differences between candidates within a party are less than the differences between parties).

This level of funding in general elections is somewhat unique to the US. Different campaign finance arrangements mean that parties in the UK and Australia both have closer to $10 per voter in a marginal seat. 11 12

In these circumstances the experiments suggesting a cost of $40-100 per vote could even be overestimates, but I haven’t yet investigated the research on the impact of campaign spending outside the US.

The question of when political campaigns are the best use of someone’s charitable giving is also beyond the scope of this article, and seems likely to hinge on how well funded the campaigns are and how large the difference is between candidates.

But if you can encourage someone to vote for <$100, while you think the social value of an extra vote is >$10,000, then it should be possible to make a case that it’s competitive with other options. That is something I hope to investigate in more detail in future.

And if voting yourself is worthwhile, contacting friends and family to encourage them to do the same will also usually be above the bar.

Overall, is it altruistic to vote?

The answer is clearly yes, under the following conditions:

The election concerns important issues, such as the allocation of large amounts of money, or the foreign policy of a country with a large military
One candidate is substantially better than the other, and you’re in a position to know which one that is
The election is somewhat competitive, and you’re able to vote in a competitive seat, or district, or state

In a situation like that, the hour you spend voting is likely to be the most impactful one in your entire year, and could on average get you some influence over how hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars are spent. For this reason I vote whenever I get the chance.

When they vote, some of my friends feel very nervous about whether they’re voting for the right person. While there’s a lot they don’t know, surveys how much the public knows about policy issues suggest that they’re a lot more informed than the average voter, and so their input should increase the odds of the better candidate winning. We shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

All of that said, I respect people who consciously opt out of following politics, in order to preserve their focus on other important work that improves the world. Following politics and developing informed views can absorb a great deal of time. While spending one hour voting is highly impactful, spending hundreds of hours tracking politics in between elections isn’t — at least if you aren’t regularly taking action based on what you’re learning.

Finally, while persuading other people to vote takes more time or money than simply voting yourself, in elections where you’re confident one candidate is much better for the world than another, joining or donating to a political campaign may also represent a high-impact way of improving the world.

Has this article helped you better estimate how important it is to vote?

As we noted above, appeals from people they know are much more likely to influence people’s behaviour than TV ads or impersonal mail. Some experiments suggest a personal appeal from a friend could increase someone’s likelihood of voting by as much as 10 percentage points. So consider sharing this article with your friends.

Notes and references

i. Probability of Events that Have Never Occurred: When Is Your Vote Decisive? ii. What is the probability that your vote will make a difference? iii. Empirically investigating the electoral college

In these papers the authors look at various historical presidential elections from the perspective of someone who has access to polling data a few weeks ahead of the vote. With what likelihood should they have expected that one vote would change the outcome?

The first found a probability of 1 in 10 million of a typical single vote being decisive in 1992, with a chance of 1 in 3.5 million for a swing state such as Vermont. The second found a probability of 1 in 60 million for a single vote in a random state, and 1 in 10 million for swing states such as New Mexico or Virginia. That compares to an electorate of around 120 million voters.

As they put it:

‘A probability of 1 in 10 million is tiny but, as discussed by Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan (2007), can provide a rational reason for voting; in this perspective, a vote is like a lottery ticket with a 1 in 10 million chance of winning, but the payoff is the chance to change national policy and improve (one hopes) the lives of hundreds of millions, compared to the alternative if the other candidate were to win.’

The third paper also looks at the presidential election in 2000, the closest in modern history, and (using a rougher methodology) found that the probability of an average vote changing the outcome was around 1 in 6 million in 2000. If we take the same range from an average to swing state proposed in the second paper, that suggests that voters in the key swing states could have a 1 in 2 million chance of swinging the election.

The reality is that in most states, including California, New York or Texas, an additional vote has no ability to swing the outcome, because these states are not close themselves. Even if they were close, they couldn’t swing the electoral college from one candidate to another, because a close election in California implies an incredibly unbalanced election in the rest of the country. Almost all of their influence instead becomes concentrated on a handful of swing states. ↩

This piece also builds upon previous articles from the rationality community such as Politics as Charity by Carl Shulman and Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity . ↩
You can see a current and easy-to-read version of the model here , updated figures here , and the numbers we used from October 14 here . ↩
The chance of a tie in an election with perfectly even polling is proportional to 1 over the square root of the number of voters, and note that sqrt(10) = 3.2 and sqrt(5) = 2.2. ↩

Political parties and candidates know they’re in a competitive and strategic race to get the most votes. If they can’t get elected they can’t achieve anything, so they constantly adapt their positions, and add or remove interest groups from their coalition, to ensure they have a decent chance of winning.

If young voters in the US suddenly started voting at the same rate as seniors — 70% rather than 42% — any political party that didn’t adjust its positions to increase its appeal to those voters would quickly become irrelevant.

So rather than thinking of your vote as having a tiny chance of completely swinging an election outcome, you can instead think of it as having a high chance of nudging every party just a little bit in the direction of the political views held by you and people like you. This is one reason there’s still value in voting, even if this year’s election doesn’t happen to be especially close: by indicating you’ll vote in future years you give politicians much more reason to appeal to you.

I’ll also just add that in multi-party systems, such as those involving proportional representation, rather than completely flip an election result your vote is more likely to change which grouping of parties forms a coalition government, and their relative influence within the coalition.

What both of these alternative analyses have in common is that they replace a very small chance of a hugely valuable outcome, with a higher chance of a somewhat less valuable outcome.

While formalising either of these models is going to be more challenging, I expect that these two changes will usually roughly cancel out, leaving the overall expected value about the same. ↩

As you can vote in all of these elections simultaneously (and often state and local election too!), and on average their terms are four years each, for simplicity I’ll treat them though they were all elected simultaneously each four years.

As you might expect, if you can vote in marginal elections for two of these bodies at once the case for voting will be about twice as strong as if you can only do so for one. ↩

See this book on the likely deaths from a nuclear war. ↩
From Wikipedia : “Body counts counted at least 110,600 violent deaths as of April 2009 (Associated Press). The Iraq Body Count project documents 185,000 – 208,000 violent civilian deaths through Feb 2020 in their table.” ↩
Ipsos: A global view of the 2020 US presidential election
YouGov: Europe wants Joe Biden
Pew Research Center: Merkel and Macron trusted globally
Pew Research Center: Trump’s International Ratings Remain Low, Especially Among Key Allies
YouGov 2016: How other countries would vote in the American election . ↩
The most extreme case I could find was the Senate campaign of Al Gross in Alaska who has raised $57 for each person who voted in Alaska in 2016. ↩
In 2017 the Conservative party spent £18.6m contesting about 10% of the actual seats. Across the whole election 32 million votes were cast. This comes to about $8 USD per voter. ↩

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Two Paths for Jewish Politics

An illustration of a woman covering her eyes with two Seder candles shaped like Roman columns burning in front of her.

My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.”

Thirty-one years later, everyone’s thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who’s the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus , deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders. “I want you to kneel down and touch the stone which paved the grounds of Auschwitz,” the Oregon Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer declared at a hearing in May, urging a visit to D.C.’s Holocaust museum. “I want you to peer over the countless shoes of murdered Jews.” She gave no indication of knowing that one of the leaders she was addressing had been a victim of antisemitism or that another was the descendant of Holocaust survivors.

It’s no accident that non-Jews talk about Jews as if we aren’t there. According to the historian David Nirenberg , talking about the Jews—not actual Jews but Jews in the abstract—is how Gentiles make sense of their world, from the largest questions of existence to the smallest questions of economics. Nirenberg’s focus is “anti-Judaism,” how negative ideas about Jews are woven into canons of Western thought. But as I learned that summer in Tennessee, and as we’re seeing today, concern can be as revealing as contempt. Often the two go hand in hand.

Consider the Antisemitism Awareness Act , which the House of Representatives recently passed by a vote of 320–91. The act purports to be a response to rising antisemitism in the United States. Yet the murder of Jews, synagogue shootings, and cries of “Jews will not replace us” are clearly not what the bill is designed to address. Nearly half of Republicans believe in the “great replacement theory,” after all, and their leader draws from the same well .

The bill will instead outfit the federal government with a new definition of antisemitism that would shield Israel from criticism and turn campus activism on behalf of Palestinians into acts of illegal discrimination. (Seven of the definition’s eleven examples of antisemitism involve opposition to the State of Israel.) Right-wingers who vocally oppose the bill—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz , Tucker Carlson , and Charlie Kirk—have little problem with its Zionist agenda. They just worry that it will implicate those who believe the Jews are Christ killers.

The G.O.P. is not the only party whose solicitude for the Jews betrays an underlying unease. President Biden has said repeatedly that without Israel no Jew in the world is safe. It sounds like a statement of solidarity, but it’s really a confession of bankruptcy, a disavowal of the democratic state’s obligation to protect its citizens equally. As Biden told a group of Jewish leaders in 2014, nine months before Trump announced his Presidential campaign, “You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States . . . there is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the State of Israel.” I’ve lived most of my life in the United States; three of my four grandparents were born here. If the President of my country—a liberal and a Democrat, no less—is saying that my government can’t protect me, where am I supposed to go? I’m Jewish, not Israeli.

Some Jews might feel cheered by Republican crusades against antisemitism or Democratic affirmations of Israel. But there is a long history to these special provisions and professions of concern. Repeating patterns from the ancient and medieval world—and abandoning the innovations pioneered by Jews in the United States—they are bad for democracy. And bad for the Jews.

Contrary to popular myth, the history of Jews and Gentiles is not one of unremitting hostility or eternal antisemitism. It is a chronicle of oscillation, Hannah Arendt argued , a cycle of “special discrimination” and “special favor,” with sovereigns bestowing—then revoking—power and privilege upon the Jews. Jewish leaders, lacking sovereignty of their own, eager to defend their brethren from twitchy neighbors, made themselves indispensable, providing resources to Popes and emperors, lords and kings. They used their favored status to create autonomous communities for their people. Despite their success, or perhaps because of it, they never erased the fine line that separates persecution from protection.

Texts sacred and secular tell the story. A seldom discussed chapter in Genesis lets slip that long before the Israelites were enslaved by Pharaoh, Joseph was ensconced in Pharaoh’s court. As Pharaoh’s right-hand man, Joseph compelled Egypt’s farmers to sell their land for food during a famine, effectively rendering them serfs of the state. Not long after, Exodus opens with a report that “there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” This new king turned the Egyptians against the Israelites.

After the Greeks conquered Egypt, the Jews of Alexandria were largely denied citizenship in the Hellenic empire. They still managed to curry favor with rulers, which placed them above native Egyptians in the social hierarchy. Centuries later, after the Romans took over, the new regime continued this tradition, adding the envy of the Greeks to the hatred of the Egyptians, stirring up a riotous stew.

Christianity, the child of Judaism, introduced a dangerously Oedipal ingredient to the mix. Despite Christian teaching that the Jews were responsible for Christ’s death, Augustine explained that the Jews should be treated as a people of witness, suitable for preservation rather than punishment. Alive, they testified to the truth of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels’ predecessor. Dispersed and miserable, they proved the peril of refusing Christ. It was the obligation of Christian rulers to look after the Jews, Augustine claimed , to maintain them “separate in their observance and unlike the rest of the world.”

By providing a theological gloss on an old idea, Augustine put Jews in the crosshairs of Christian politics. At moments of calm, they received privileges and charters granting them levels of autonomy, access, and security that not all groups enjoyed. In thirteenth-century Poland, the historian David Myers writes , Christians could even be fined if they “failed to heed the cries of Jews in the middle of the night.” At moments of change, they were targets of persecution and slaughter. Either way, their fortunes were tied to that of the sovereign, who could be accused of granting the Jews too much protection or not enough.

That left Jewish leaders forever scanning the horizon for trouble—usually from the sovereign or the Gentiles surrounding them, and sometimes from their own people, who were suspicious of their contacts outside the community. As they came to play the role of the “court Jew,” advising the rulers of the medieval era and financing the treasuries of early modern states, they accumulated power and incurred resentment. But with the consolidation of modern nation-states, which claimed to speak for peoples rather than through kings, the hard-won lessons of Jewish élite politics grew increasingly obsolete. Across the Atlantic, a new, more democratic, model beckoned.

Not a single Jew signed the Declaration of Independence or deliberated at the Constitutional Convention. That probably had more to do with numbers—they were a mere twenty-five hundred of 2.5 million people—than with animus. For long before America’s revolutionaries affixed their names to the ideals of freedom, equality, and republican governance, Jews in America had been learning the arts of democracy.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Jews petitioned colonial governments for the democratic rights of membership and participation, responding to leaders like Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who saw the polity as “a receptacle for people of several Sorts and Opinions.” They built a coalition with the Huguenots of South Carolina to demand their rights. Even before the Revolution, they secured the right, with Quakers, to affirm their allegiance to the government without taking an oath of Christian faith. After the Revolution, they were primed to convert that victory into the right to hold government office. They avowed no special virtues, disavowed no special vices, invoked no high connections. They simply stood by the Constitution, which prohibits religious tests for federal office, and their service to the revolutionary cause.

In Europe, emancipation was often conditioned on cleaving the citizen from the Jew. “The Jews should be refused everything as a nation,” one delegate to the French National Assembly declared, “but granted everything as individuals.” Many American Jews sought to avoid that separation. Instead of abandoning Judaism or relegating it to the private sphere, they designed their institutions in the image of the democracy they were helping to build. As the historian Hasia Diner has shown , synagogues wrote their own constitutions, with democratic procedures, a bill of rights, and provisions for amendment. Government officials were invited to address congregations rather than negotiate with individual élites. Where Jews in modern Europe worked with states to anoint one body to represent them all, continuing the medieval tradition of a single interceding voice between sovereign and Jewry, Jews in America created a multiplicity of organizations, some more democratic than others, none with the power or authority to speak for the whole.

The climax of this distinctively modern approach to Jewish politics came not in defense of the Jews but in support of the New Deal and the Black Freedom struggle. This may seem paradoxical, instances of Jewish do-gooders acting on behalf of others. The protagonists saw things differently. As the Jewish Community Relations Council of Cincinnati declared in 1963, “The society in which Jews are most secure, is itself secure, only to the extent that citizens of all races and creeds enjoy full equality.” This was the opposite of the lesson that Jews had learned across the European millennia.

Although struggles for reform in the United States could provoke antisemitic backlashes, American Jews understood that only in a full and complete democracy could they live full and complete lives. After decades of splitting their votes between Democrats and Republicans, more than ninety per cent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944. Orthodox and Reform Jews alike united to welcome the Brown decision, declaring integration, in the words of one Jewish leader, “a veritable fulfillment of our own Jewish purpose and our American dream of destiny.”

In recent years, it’s become fashionable to argue that democracy cannot withstand antisemitism. At moments of intense polarization or economic insecurity, anxious voters look for scapegoats—immigrants, Blacks, Jews—and racist demagogues to get rid of them. In keeping with this waning faith in democracy, influential Jews have reverted to the European model. Instead of organizing or joining democratic movements to fight racism, defend immigration, and build social democracy, Jewish leaders and donors supplicate sovereigns or would-be sovereigns who are antisemitic , or aligned with antisemitism , yet promise special protection for the Jews at home or in Israel. The result is a curious coalition of Jew-lovers and Jew-haters, reminding us that, as Arendt wrote, “society always reacted first to a strong antisemitic movement with marked preference for Jews.”

A forgotten episode from the most polarizing moment in American history, compactly reconstructed by the historian Jonathan Sarna , suggests that democracy has more to offer us than special dispensations from the sovereign. On December 17, 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the expulsion of all Jews living in his zone of command, which spanned parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. “The most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all American history,” Grant’s order had the potential to affect thousands of Jewish men, women, and children in the region, many of them recent immigrants.

Jews had reasons to worry. Wars seldom go well for the Jews, and this one had stirred up all sorts of antisemitism, notably in the North. Jews held prominent positions in the Confederacy. Long identified with money and greed, they were associated in the northern mind with cotton speculators, gold smugglers, corruption, and illegal trade. Grant had his own demons when it came to the Jews, but, even if he hadn’t, he had a penchant for collective punishment. Expelling Jews as a wartime measure against smuggling—and that is what General Orders No. 11 was—was the least of it. Everything seemed primed for a repeat of expulsions past: from ancient Israel; from medieval England, France, and Spain; from cities and towns in Central and Eastern Europe; and now from the “Department of the Tennessee.”

But then that rarest thing in Jewish history happened: nothing. With a few exceptions, Grant’s order was hardly enforced. At least one commander initially defied it, claiming that “he was an officer of the army and not of a church.” As soon as President Lincoln learned of it, on January 3, 1863, he ordered it revoked, which Grant did three days later. “To condemn a class,” Lincoln said, “is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”

Of course, a lot happened between December 17th and January 6th, but it belongs to the history of democratic action, rather than Jewish suffering. As soon as a Union captain tried to implement Grant’s order, in Paducah, Kentucky, the Jews mobilized. A group of Paducah locals sent an angry telegram to Lincoln. They went to the national press, which reported the story, and many newspapers editorialized against the order. Isaac Mayer Wise, one of America’s leading rabbis, reminded his fellow-citizens that the order was “everybody’s business,” not just the Jews’. As a final step, the Jews marched on Washington (really, they just travelled in small delegations to the capital). With the help of a sympathetic former congressman, they met with Lincoln, who assured them of his opposition to the order.

It’s no accident that Lincoln’s revocation of Grant’s order came two days after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The war turned the battle against slavery into a more general struggle for freedom and equality, which continued long after the fighting was done. In 1868, the Presidential election pitted the Republican Grant against the Democrat Horatio Seymour, whose running mate was a firm opponent of Black equality. Though Reconstruction and Black suffrage were the main issues on the ballot, Jews played an unprecedented role in the election. Anticipating a close result, particularly in battleground states in the Midwest, both parties courted the Jewish vote. Democrats reminded Jewish voters that Grant had shown his true colors with General Orders No. 11. They also warned that Jews would be replaced by Black freedmen, who were Christian. Countering these narrow appeals to Jewish particularity, Jewish Republicans pointed out that Grant had atoned for his order, and that his party’s belief that “all men of all races should be equal” made him “the best man for us Israelites.”

After Grant won, he aggressively pursued the twin causes of Black and Jewish equality, which he saw as the cornerstones of human rights. He stood fast against various efforts to make the United States a Christian nation, pushing for a constitutional amendment that would create free public schools with no teaching of religion. His eight years in office saw the building of many new and beautiful synagogues. Grant appointed more Jews to government office than any President before him. Simon Wolf—who declared a triple identity for himself as “German by birth, an Israelite by faith, and . . . a thorough American by adoption”—was named Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. Affirming that “a Jew must not have any prejudice,” Wolf proclaimed to have appointed the first Black man to a clerkship in his office; that man was the son of Frederick Douglass. After James Garfield was elected President in 1880, he made Douglass Recorder of Deeds, a position continuously held by a Black person until 1952.

History seldom offers any lessons, but this one is clear. American Jews pioneered a new way of being Jewish and democratic. They did it in coalition with other subjugated groups. In the twentieth century, their lodestar was a multiracial egalitarian society. The fading of that vision is a symptom not of rising fascism or even increasing antisemitism but of regression—to an early, eerie, European way of doing things. It’s not good for democracy. And it’s never been good for the Jews. ♦

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Vote Wisely: Demand Honesty and Integrity

3 Min Read | Sep 23, 2021

Maybe those excuses are starting to sound pretty reasonable to you now. But as best-selling author and speaker Andy Andrews pointed out in an interview with Dave, if we are concerned at all about our country and its future, we must pay attention to the election and use our votes wisely.

We All Agree—Our Leaders Should Be Honest

We’ve all watched America get meaner and meaner. We’ve watched Republicans and Democrats yell at each other, and no one’s changed anyone’s mind. But ask anyone, rich or poor, black or white, old or young, “Do you think it’s okay for politicians to lie, or should they tell the truth?” Every single person you talk to will say our leaders should tell the truth.

“So the question in this election is not who is going to lead us, but what are our standards for being led?” Andrews asked in a recent visit to The Dave Ramsey Show . “Speaking the truth should be the least we require of our elected leaders,” he added. “It won’t solve all our problems, but it is a beginning.”

Demand Integrity With Your Vote

“America is a ship headed for an iceberg,” Andrews warned. “People everywhere, regardless of their political views, can sense it. We may not have candidates in this election who can turn the ship around. But right now, we better vote for somebody who is going to shift our direction and avoid the iceberg.”

This isn’t about Republican versus Democrat. It’s about demanding honesty and integrity from our leadership—and rewarding that integrity with our votes. That’s how we will elect leaders who will have the fortitude to make the hard decisions that must be made to change course.

Your Vote Can Change Our Direction

As our nation celebrated its 100th birthday, President James A. Garfield said, “Now, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. If [one hundred years from now] our next centennial does not find us a great nation… it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.”

In short, if you want leadership with integrity, then stop trusting people who lie “for our own good.” “We can change the direction of our country,” Andrews said. “But only if smart people will get involved in the election process and actually vote.”

Voting is one key way to help turn this country around. Another is for families and individuals to change their personal economies . And there’s no better way to do that than with America’s money class, Financial Peace University . Millions of families have taken control of their money and changed their futures forever. You can too.

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[OPINION] Choose your democracy wisely

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This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

What is the best way to assess and choose candidates? This question must be taken seriously by every Filipino voter, especially now that the electoral campaign has officially begun and the May 2022 election is right around the corner.

Bringing democracy back into the picture

In the absence of real political parties that are supposed to present the bases for choosing candidates, the task of “voting wisely” is more difficult. Real political parties are expected to exact accountability from their party members before, during, and after elections. The task of the voter thus is just to scrutinize the performance and trajectories of the political parties of candidates.

Given that there is no real party competition to structure choices, we, Filipino voters, have to examine “everything” about the candidates: platform and messaging (especially priorities), character (integrity issues), track record in politics and governance, alliances, business interests, and personal background (educational attainment, family background, views on religion, gender, class, etc).

And we need to examine “the walk” of these candidates, not just “the talk.” To borrow the words of actress Angelica Panganiban that have gone viral lately: Kilatising mabuti ang mga manliligaw (assess your suitors thoroughly), halughugin ang biodata mula high school at college” (review their curriculum vitae from high school to college), alamin at tignan ang character references (evaluate character references), huwag magpapabudol at huwag sa magnanakaw (avoid scammers and thieves).

In this piece, I present yet another angle that further operationalizes that notion of “voting wisely.” I argue that voters have to consider the political regime that the candidates are likely to create or uphold if elected into office, i.e whether their rule will be democratic or not. I make the democracy discourse central because I think the Duterte government has been very successful in messing up our notions of democracy. We no longer seem to know what the requirements of a democracy are (e.g. extrajudicial killings as compatible with democracy?). Most importantly, many no longer seem to care what the requirements of democracy are (e.g. nakakain ba yang demokrasya? ). It is this apathy towards the presence/absence/benefits of democracy that we should guard against in this election.

I present three options here: (i) a democracy that accepts authoritarianism, (ii) a democracy that rejects authoritarianism, and (iii) a democracy that rejects both authoritarianism and elite dominance. I also present my examination and analysis of what kind of democracy each of the (presidential) candidates represent. My analysis of the candidates could be wrong. But I will insist on this one assertion: we need to talk about democracy again.

[Editorial] We have one, big democracy project. What to do?

Option 1: A democracy that accepts authoritarianism

This kind of democracy is obviously the “Duterte brand.” Despite the anti-democratic features of his regime, President Rodrigo Duterte was able to generate people’s consent (which is central to a democracy). He generated consent institutionally through a supermajority in Congress and the repression of critics, and directly/individually through the creation of “diehard supporters.” Because President Duterte merely captured and did not dismantle institutions of representation and participation, the Philippines, under his watch, could not easily nor categorically be labelled as non-democratic.

In political science, regimes that have both authoritarian and democratic features are often called either “semi-democratic” or “semi-authoritarian” or “hybrid” regimes. Such typology is often used to refer to East Asian democracies that do not necessarily follow the Western model of liberal democracy. Studies on these semi-democracies often revolve around examining Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia – all of which have strong bureaucracies that have enabled them to “assist capitalism” rather than “leave the market alone” (this is why they are sometimes called “developmental states” – where government, not the free market, directs the nation’s economic development).

In these countries, governments are formed out of ruling parties and regimes are assessed based on the relative strength of ruling parties vis-à-vis the military and other state institutions. Despite having illiberal features, these regimes often allow some degree of independence of the press, protect certain (but not all) rights and liberties, and insist on the rule of law or citizen compliance of the law.

Because the mixture of liberal and illiberal features in these regimes is integral to their societies (i.e. they do not seem to want to transition to a Western-type liberal democracy model), they are often considered “stable.” State institutions are still discernible, the business of governance is linked to meritocracy-based bureaucracies, and there are internal checks on government non-performance or violation of internal rules and policies.

The Duterte brand is nowhere near this kind of hybrid regime. The Duterte regime merely captured state institutions for its own particularistic interests. It did not professionalize or mobilize institutions towards some national interest or development agenda. Rather, it just created a crisis (the drug war) and identified enemies (e.g. dilawan, drug addicts, communists, terrorists, imperialists) to consolidate people’s support. It created the perception of an “us” versus a “them.” Ironically, when a real crisis (COVID-19) hit the country, government’s incapacity to deal with crisis was revealed. The Philippines has been last on every list that has to do with COVID response or crisis resilience. To a very great extent, the “strongman rule” of Duterte turned out to be mostly rhetoric: he did not solve the drugs problem in six months, he did not jetski to Scarborough Shoal, he did not keep the promise that “by December 2020,” things will be “back to normal.” The Duterte administration is not about a successful experiment at strongman rule. It is about failed (fake?) promises and wasted political capital.

This is why there has been no rhyme or reason to government’s problem-solving endeavors in the past six years. Even with the onslaught of a global pandemic, President Duterte continued with his predictably unpredictable ways. No rule of law. No internal checks. No clear purpose. Just successful emotional and (a)moral appeals to the people. This is also why the Duterte regime is known more as an “authoritarian populist” regime rather than a semi-authoritarian one.

While the Bongbong Marcos (BBM)-Sara Duterte tandem vows “to move on from the past,” it clearly comes across as Duterte’s “successor” (i.e the tandem is not likely to reverse most of Duterte’s pronouncements). This “Uni-team” is not likely to break away from being authoritarian populist. In my calculation, however, both Marcos Jr. and Duterte Jr. are likely to be more populist than authoritarian – especially if they win with a wide margin. Even today, their rhetoric is “unity” and I wouldn’t be surprised if they will exert effort to draw electoral opponents into their fold once they are in power. So, there will likely be changes but I don’t think they will ever be able to create a political-economic system anywhere near the semi-authoritarian regimes of the East Asian models. In those models, politics is not all patronage-based and governance is not all hit-and miss. Technocrats, more than politicians (and more than political families!), are given premium.

One cannot move towards the “East Asian model” without rules, without collective purpose, and without mathematics. Like Rodrigo Duterte, BBM and Sara Duterte have declared oversimplistic promises and showed overrated achievements. They won’t be able to deliver even a stable semi-democracy.

So, to those who believe BBM and Sara Duterte will bring the Philippines to the level or likes of Singapore or South Korea: huwag magpabudol . That’s not going to happen. Not with political dynasties or oligarchic family corporations as their main driver of economic activities and the main beneficiary of the fruits of economic activities.

[ANALYSIS] Fulfilling the promise of a democracy

Option 2: A democracy that rejects authoritarianism; and Option 3: A democracy that rejects both authoritarianism and elite dominance

These two options have to be taken together because practically all of the other candidates have made claims espousing either one or both types of democracy.

But first things first: which among the presidential candidates genuinely rejects authoritarianism?

Having been allies of President Duterte’s governance and/or specific policies in the past, it is understandable that some quarters may consider Isko Moreno, Manny Pacquiao, and Ping Lacson to still be part of Option 1. This is a valid assertion especially for Isko Moreno who has repeatedly praised “the good things” that both President Duterte and the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos had done in their administrations. Yet, Moreno also distances himself from that past by offering himself as the “healing president.” This offer suggests an acknowledgment that even President Duterte had caused wounds that need healing.

Manny Pacquiao has also been a clear Duterte ally in the past six years but his claim to being part of the opposition is more apparent than Moreno’s because he exposed corrupt practices of the Duterte administration. While this may have been mainly for election purposes, it nevertheless earned him a place as part of the “opposition.” Pacquiao visited Duterte once in Malacañang during the period of filing of candidacy but he has not budged from his claim of government corruption.

Ping Lacson is a more complex character because he was not supportive of all of President Duterte’s policies and has positioned himself as an independent thinker and policy-maker. The alliance with Duterte was most visible only with Lacson’s support of the anti-terrorism law that was clearly weaponized against Duterte critics. Moreover, Lacson’s background as an enabler of Martial Law as part of the Philippine Constabulary from 1971 to 1986 is hard to overlook. As long as there are Martial Law victims who are still alive, Lacson’s human rights record (and therefore, his propensity for authoritarian ways) will always be questioned. Despite this, however, Lacson’s dominant image is that of a statesman rather than a police officer. In recent interviews, he has also been very vocal of the Duterte government’s excesses and omissions.

The two other candidates, Leni Robredo and Leody de Guzman, are obviously part of Option 2. Both were at the receiving end of Duterte’s authoritarianism. Robredo was ousted from the Duterte Cabinet very early on and all throughout the six years, she had to endure public criticisms of either being vindictive or incompetent – from Duterte himself and from Duterte’s supporters. De Guzman, meanwhile, represents non-institutional opposition to the excesses of the Duterte administration, especially in terms of the violation of human rights and workers’ rights.

Leni Robredo initially received some criticism over her pronouncement and seeming support for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ECLAC), but said criticism didn’t stick because Robredo’s human rights record is spotless. Despite confusing policy declarations, everyone could see that she was/is no human rights violator.

Regarding Option 3 – a democracy that rejects both authoritarianism and elite dominance: this is an ideological position that promotes the deepening of democracy, not just in politics but also in the economic arena. It carries with it a Marxist/Leftist critique of liberal democracy and economic liberalism. The Leody de Guzman-Walden Bello tandem is the main advocate of this position with their call for “systems change, not just regime change.”

But is the De Guzman-Bello tandem the only advocate of systemic change? All the other candidates who belong to Option 2 (those who do not accept authoritarianism) have intimated at some systemic change. Leni Robredo for example has taken a strong stance against ending contractualization, which suggests a class bias. Panfilo Lacson has repeatedly lambasted the pork barrel system and the misuse of public funds. Isko Moreno talks about “building better.” And Manny Pacquiao has been making the pitch for the prioritization of mass, public transportation and has declared his opposition to the privatization of public utilities.

[OPINION] Campaign promises are good, but don’t we have trillions in debts to pay?

It is not clear, however, whether the candidates outside the De Guzman-Bello tandem will govern with a class (worker-proletariat) bias. Even Leni Robredo who has worked as an alternative lawyer for workers rights cannot just dismiss the reality that her party, the Liberal Party, was part of the political alliance that created more, not fewer, class divisions in society. The “failed EDSA democracy” is a reality – it is a democracy that has not benefitted the masses, but rather, has become a democracy dominated by economic and political elites.

Despite that failed EDSA democracy, I think the De Guzman-Bello call for systems change is not gaining traction because it has been made without the backing of a unified class-based movement. Without this unity, the call comes across as weak – because if the various sections of the Left can’t agree on Leftist electoral appeals, how can it hope to generate support from outside of its ranks?

The options for democracy presented here are my approximations of the type of democracy (or authoritarianism) that the presidential candidates for the May 2022 elections are likely to institute, if elected president. But these options are also for us, voters, to think about – for as long as we question the state of our democracy, we may be a step closer to being actually democratic.

“Voting wisely” this May 2022 elections entails thinking critically about Philippine democracy – its past, present, and future.

And who is my personal choice? Ideologically, I lean towards Option 3 as I am a firm believer that we need to develop a democracy that will benefit the many, not just the few. But this election, I choose the presidential candidate who clearly represents at least Option 2. Someone who has not only weathered the authoritarian, populist storm that is President Rodrigo Duterte (and the Marcoses!) but has remained calm – and democratic – through it all.

Yes, that someone is a she . – Rappler.com

Carmel V. Abao teaches political science at the Ateneo de Manila University.

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New CDCE Survey Shows Millions Lack ID as Voter ID Laws Spread to More States

March 13, 2024

Voter ID laws are spreading. The public needs accurate and current data on their impact.

Since 2020, 17 states have passed new voter ID laws or made existing voter ID laws more strict. 38 states now have some kind of ID law in place to vote, more than ever before in our country’s history. These laws often appear to have strong bipartisan public support. Indeed, a recent survey from Pew found that 81% of Americans - including 69% of Democrats - say they support “requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID” when they vote. Support for voter ID laws has risen, especially among Democrats, since 2018.

As voter ID laws have spread and gained public support, the danger of ID based disenfranchisement - eligible voters being denied their right to vote because they cannot meet or are confused about a state ID requirement - potentially grows. But research about the impact of voter ID has not kept up with the needs of the public and policy makers. While large surveys like the American National Election Studies ask some questions about whether respondents have a driver’s license or passport, they are not specific enough to ascertain whether they would be disenfranchised by voter ID laws. The last nationally representative survey that could address the full impact of voter ID was conducted in 2006. And even that study did not have oversamples of key populations that are most in danger of ID based disenfranchisement.

CDCE’s collaboration with VoteRiders, Brennan Center, and Public Wise means we can know more than ever about the impact of voter ID laws.

As voter ID laws proliferate, it’s critical that scholars, policy makers, and community partners work together to provide detailed and current information about who these laws impact. That’s why CDCE has established an ongoing collaboration with VoteRiders, Brennan Center, and Public Wise to do research that is informed by the experiences of people working directly to combat ID based disenfranchisement in communities across the country. In 2023, we published an initial set of findings based on ANES data and developed a strategy for a public survey that would do more to include people experiencing ID based disenfranchisement. This included making investments in a sample drawn from pre-paid cell phones and oversamples of respondents that allow us to understand the way ID based disenfranchisement specifically affects 18-24 year olds, Black people, Hispanic people, and people with incomes under $30,000/year.

We found that nearly 21 million Americans do not have a driver’s license. 2.6 million Americans lack government issued photo ID of any kind - these people could not vote in many states today.

Graph showing percentage of respondents of different demographics that have no ID at all

2.6 million people lack any form of government issued photo ID. This is the population most at risk of ID based disenfranchisement today. These results confirm that there is a large population of eligible voters who cannot vote in the 2024 election unless they take on the significant costs necessary to get a government issued photo ID.

Graph showing No Driver's License by Race

Many voter ID laws are written with the implicit assumption that nearly everyone can use a driver’s license to comply with them. This survey shows that over 20 million Americans do not have a driver’s license. These Americans are not distributed evenly in the population. Black and hispanic people are more likely to lack a driver’s license. 30% of Black people aged 18-29 did not have a license - far more than any other population in the survey.

Graph showing No Driver's License by Party

There were also important differences by partisan identity. While millions of Americans of all partisan identities lack a drivers license, independent voters lack a driver's license at double the rate of Democrats and triple the rate of Republicans.

34.5 million Americans do not have a any license or state ID card or do not have one with their current address or name. Even more are confused about what ID they need to vote.

Graph showing who doesn't have a Driver's license by race and ethnicity.

The number of people potentially disenfranchised by voter ID laws expands dramatically when we consider people who do not have their current name or address on their drivers license. As voter ID laws get more strict, this population becomes at risk of ID based disenfranchisement. Substantial numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and independents are all in danger of ID based disenfranchisement if states enact or implement voter ID laws in ways that require individuals to have the address on their license match the address where they are registered to vote.

Some groups would be hit particularly hard by these types of strict ID policies. We found that 18 - 24 year olds are 4 times as likely as people over 65 to not have their current name or address on their driver’s license.

Graph showing driver's license by income

People without a high school degree are 4 times as likely as people making over $100,000 annually to not have a driver’s license with their current name and address.

Over half of Americans are at risk of being disenfranchised as a result of confusion about voter ID laws.

Graph showing perceptions of Voter ID Laws in states where Photo ID is required

In states where photo ID is required to vote, 55% of people didn’t know about that requirement. This confusion could result in potential voters not realizing they don’t have the ID they need to vote until after it is too late to procure one. Independents are particularly unlikely to know about their state ID requirements.

Graph showing perceptions of Voter ID Laws in states where Photo ID is not required

In states that do not require government issued photo ID to vote, over 1/3 of people thought that it was. These people are at risk of staying home from the polls because they lack ID even though their state does not require one. Republicans are particularly likely to think they are required to show ID when it is not required.

Graph showing 2020 turnout in states that require or request photo ID

We also found that confusion about voter ID laws is most widespread among people who did not vote in 2020. The precise people who we need to engage to build a more inclusive democracy are the people who are most likely to be experiencing ID based disenfranchisement as a result of being confused about the requirements of voter ID laws.

Support for Voter ID laws is not the same thing as support for ID based disenfranchisement. We found supermajority support for policies that address this problem.

The same Pew study that found over 80% of Americans support requiring photo ID to vote also found that broad majorities of Americans support policies like expanded early voting, same day registration, automatic voter registration, and allowing people convicted of felonies to vote after serving their sentences . These data suggests that many of the people who say they support voter ID laws are not saying they support using ID status to disenfranchise large numbers of Americans.

Graph showing support for requiring all high schools to provide ID's to students who do not yet have a driver's license.

Our survey confirms the finding that there is broad bi-partisan public support for policies that address ID based disenfranchisement. In our survey, we tested questions about programs that would mandate that all high schools provide official state ID cards to students who do not yet have a driver’s license. Over 80% of Democrats and Republicans support this policy.

These data suggest that there are many potential messages that can effectively mobilize and engage the plurality of Americans who currently support voter ID laws but oppose ID based disenfranchisement. This is a fruitful area for future research.

The Upshot? We know more about voter ID than ever before and there is urgent work to be done based on this survey.

This study shows the importance of ongoing research collaborations between scholars and community organizations to continually update our understanding of who is impacted by the ever changing landscape around voter ID. In the coming months, CDCE is working with partners at VoteRiders, Brennan Center, and Public Wise to explore opportunities to do state based studies that would give us much better estimates of the scale of ID based disenfranchisement in key states.

This study also shows that there is urgent work to be done to help Americans without any form of ID access the ballot and to ensure that voter ID laws are not made stricter or implemented in ways that could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who have ID without their current address or are confused about voter ID requirements.

Lastly, this study confirms past findings that broad public support for voter ID laws is not the same thing as broad support for ID based disenfranchisement. Indeed, our study shows that there is actually super majority support for some policies that could make a major difference in addressing ID based disenfranchisement.

We are looking forward to digging deeper into the nature of ID based disenfranchisement in the coming months. Please reach out to us if you have suggestions about what we should study or if you’d like to use or get involved with this research in any way!

Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the UMD Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.

Jillian Andres Rothschild is a PhD student studying American public opinion and political psychology in the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics.

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Map created by VoteRiders

Infographic depicting the status of Voter I.D. laws across each state.

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Forum asks: What makes a wise voter?

By jules jurado, published april 20, 2010 at 10:37 pm.

WITH NUMEROUS external forces influencing the voters for the May 2010 elections, how could one vote wisely?

This issue was tackled on “Debunking Wise Voting,” a talk organized by the Politics and Governance (PoS100) classes, with Pulse Asia President Dr. Ronald Holmes and University of the Philippines-Diliman professor Randy David as speakers.

It was held March 3 at the Leong Hall Auditorium.

Vote for nation building

In an effort to define who a wise voter is, David said, “A wise voter must make a decision with a clear value, especially in line with nation-building.”

“What matters is [that] alam natin kung saan natin gustong pumunta ang ating bansa [we know what direction we want our country to go to]. We must know what we need to be and what we want to be as a nation,” he added.

David defined nation building as making decisions and building a self-reliant economy without depending on foreign power, and the capability to govern justly and with accountability. He also said that to vote wisely is to vote for the nation’s future.

“We should have leaders we can be proud of–to make us proud to become Filipinos,” he said.

Holmes, on the other hand, defined a wise voter as rational, informed, and sovereign. “A wise voter is someone who can calculate the costs and benefits of his [or] her voting position. [He or she] does not make a decision unless he [or] she is informed. And he or she should not be influenced by extraneous elements,” he said.

Holmes also spoke of the things that could influence the voting preferences of citizens. He said that the determinants of voting are usually socio-demographic attributes like family, party identification, candidate images, issue positions, and media, among others.

Mature voting

David also emphasized the importance of maturity in voting. He defined maturity as the capacity for self-reflection, self-examination, and self-criticism, and the capability to stand back and question one’s own choices.

“A wise voter is not content with just making a decision on a social issue. He goes beyond this and tests this decision against the decisions of others, [then] persuades others to vote in a way he [or] she has decided to vote,” he added.

He added that citizens always have reasons when voting for particular individuals but would rather give “publicly acceptable” answers.

“Most of the time, regardless of who we are, we tend to like particular individuals… Yet when pressed for reasons, we would be too embarrassed to admit the real reasons why we prefer a particular individual,” he said.

One student asked David who for him is the best candidate for the nation’s future. David refused to answer. He instead said that even though voters make the wrong decision, they will eventually learn in the process.

Positive response

Project Head for the PoS100 classes Joseph Francisco Ortega said that the speakers have successfully related the issue of politics to the people. “They tell you what is happening in our country and what should be done,” he said in Filipino.

Political Science senior Carlo Federico Demaisip agreed, “It was very informative. The speakers are experienced in the field.”

Good feedback was also shown when students and teachers alike asked questions during the open forum. “[The speakers] were able to answer most of the questions,” Ortega said.

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We all hear that voting is important, but it can be easy to feel discouraged and forget the true significance of your participation in elections.

Voting is essential because it pushes a country's democracy to function in a fair and equal way. The whole point of a democracy is to ensure that everyone has their chance to elect a candidate and vote for policies that represent and benefit their communities.

These 15 insightful quotes from influential people around the world will remind you why voting is important, why your voice matters, and why you should cast your ballot on — or ahead of — Election Day.

1. “You’ve got to vote, vote, vote, vote. That’s it; that’s the way we move forward.”

— Michelle Obama , attorney, author, and former First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017

2. “The vote is precious. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society, and we must use it.”

— John Lewis , late civil rights activist and member of the US House of Representatives for Georgia

3. “It's not enough to just want change ... You have to go and make change by voting."

— Taylor Swift , singer-songwriter and country-pop star

4. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

5. “Your voices are being heard and you’re proving to our ancestors that their struggles were not in vain. Now we have one more thing we need to do to walk in our true power, and that is to vote."

— Beyoncé , Grammy Award-winning singer and artist

6. "All of us may have been created equal. But we'll never actually be equal until we all vote. So don't wait."

— Leonardo DiCaprio , actor and producer

7. “Someone struggled for your right to vote. Use it.”

— Susan B. Anthony , women’s rights activist during the suffragette movement in the early 20th century.

8. “When we vote, our values are put into action and our voices are heard. Your voice is a reminder that you matter because you do, and you deserve to be heard."

— Meghan Markle , Duchess of Sussex

9. “There’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter. It all matters.”

— Barack Obama , 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017

10. "We have the power to make a difference. But we need to VOTE."

— Kylie Jenner , media personality and entrepreneur

11. “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.”

— Abraham Lincoln , 16th President of the United States from 1861 to 1865

12. "We all have to vote like our lives and the world depend on it, because they do. The only way to be certain of the future is to make it ourselves."

— Billie Eilish , singer-songwriter

13. “Casting a ballot isn't just something you do for yourself — it's for our collective future.”

— Oprah Winfrey , TV producer, actress, and author

14. “Our nation is asking to hear your voice because November is coming and so is your choice. Do not throw away your shot.”

— Lin-Manuel Miranda , composer, actor, singer, playwright, and creator of Hamilton

15. “Your voice will be heard. And speaking as a bit of a singer myself, I know that can be a pretty good feeling."

— Eddie Vedder , Pearl Jam frontman and Global Citizen Advocate

Learn More: Global Citizen's Mission, Impact, and What's Next

Global Citizen and HeadCount have teamed up to engage young Americans to check their voting status, register, and vote. Through the work of this groundbreaking nonpartisan collaboration, we’re activating young people to get involved and spark change in their communities by expressing opinions at the ballot box. Learn how to register to vote , volunteer , and take action right now!

Demand Equity

15 Inspirational Quotes to Get You Excited About Voting

Oct. 9, 2020

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Delhi India, 110085

Voting Awareness Essay

The voting awareness essay is a piece of writing that highlights the significance of voting. It explains how to vote and how to be a responsible voter. Many individuals desire to vote, yet many are unaware of the importance of voting or how to vote. This is where voter education comes into play. The goal of voter education is to assist individuals appreciate the significance of voting. Voting is an essential means for citizens to exert influence over their government. It is a technique for individuals to convey their desires to their leaders by increasing voter turnout. This will result in better government and what everyone desires: a free, fair, and representative democracy.

Voting allows individuals to become more active in their government while also holding it accountable. You must satisfy certain prerequisites in order to vote. Aside from voting, there are a few rules in place across the world to ensure fair elections. Knowledge Glow’s brief article about voting awareness helps us comprehend the importance of voting.

The Importance of Voting

Voting is an essential component of democracy, and it is essential for individuals to have a voice. Because everyone has the right to vote, all Indians may vote for the Prime Minister of their choosing. You can affect change and make a difference in your community by voting. It is also crucial to vote since legislation can only be repealed if the majority of citizens agree with it.

Voting is one way to become more involved with your government. Making a change in the world requires getting your voice heard and articulating the ideas of others who do not have a voice. Voting is a fantastic approach to bringing about change. Voting in elections helps citizens guarantee that the country’s rights and protection are improved.

Voting is a vital civic obligation that may have a big effect on our country’s destiny. Voting holds politicians accountable for their actions and establishes the foundation for our democracy. Voting also assures that public officials are compensated with tax money from those who can afford it. The most important decision of all is how to spend tax dollars; voting provides accountability for what goes into our government’s budget. The last thing we want is for politicians to be allowed to spend public funds without being held accountable by a vote of the people.

To summarize, this Knowledge Glow voting awareness essay for kids is intended to help children understand the importance of voting in a democracy. Voting provides citizens with a voice and allows them to participate in the democratic process. Voting also allows everyone to contribute to a more democratic society and makes the government more representative of the people. Visit Knowledge Glow for additional kids learning activities such as poetry and essays.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Voting Awareness Essay

In India, what is the voting age? In India, a person can begin voting at the age of 18.

What is the point of voting? We should vote so that our opinions are heard and our wishes are carried out. Voting is one of the most fundamental liberties that our country provides.

About The Author

Knowledge Glow

I am Komal Gupta, the founder of Knowledge Glow, and my team and I aim to fuel dreams and help the readers achieve success. While you prepare for your competitive exams, we will be right here to assist you in improving your general knowledge and gaining maximum numbers from objective questions. We started this website in 2021 to help students prepare for upcoming competitive exams. Whether you are preparing for civil services or any other exam, our resources will be valuable in the process.

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Building an empowered and well-informed generation of Filipino voters

Building on their past research works and the need for more innovative survey approaches, the Ateneo School of Government, through its public policy think tank, the Ateneo Policy Center, launched Boses, Opinyon, Siyasat, at Siyensya para sa Pilipinas (BOSES Pilipinas). It is the first university-based opinion and survey research unit that aims to provide evidence and information to secure the Filipino voice on significant public policy issues.









			Keywords: Split Test, Social Media, Voter Information, Language


s from a national survey of Filipinos in November to December 2021

Social Development Reform in the Duterte AdministrationJul-2021Abao, Carmel V; Cornelio, Jayeel S.Based on government statistics on social development, the administration of President Duterte— before the COVID-19 pandemic—had been faring well in alleviating poverty, combatting hunger, and keeping Filipino children in school. The official numbers, however, do not match the current reality of Filipinos as shown by self-rated indicators of poverty and hunger and by recent reports of problems relating to health, incomes and education. Dr. Abao and Dr. Cornelio discuss the disconnect between these two narratives and the unexpected sustained popularity of President Duterte amidst the pandemic. They examine whether or not the Duterte administration has indeed been faring well in social development, before and during the Covid- 19 pandemic. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3878607 Legislative and Constitutional Reforms Under the Duterte AdministrationJul-2021Yusingco, Michael Henry; Mendoza, Ronald U.; Mendoza, Gabrielle Ann S.; Yap, JurelThis article provides a brief overview of five years of legislative and constitutional reforms under the Duterte administration. President Duterte’s bold campaign promises were backed by wide public support, a supermajority coalition in Congress, and a unified Cabinet. Indeed, empirical evidence points to how the President’s coalition in Congress, upcoming national elections, and the President’s capacity to tag bills as urgent or priority can help fast-track the passage of laws. While this was able to translate to high legislative productivity in the 17th and 18th Congresses, crucial aspects of the President’s legislative agenda still remain pending. Moreover, key reforms that were passed are widely criticized for promoting efficiency over equity and for falling short in addressing key governance issues. Even though the President had the unprecedented institutional means to steer legislation to his agenda, we find that Duterte is no different from his predecessors who prioritize short-term and rewarding laws over meaningful long-term reforms. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3883136

OCTOBER 27, 2022

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10 ways to vote smarter

BY Pam Pastor
August 23, 2021

“Both bad driving and bad voting are dangerous not merely to the individual who practices them, but to innocent bystanders,” wrote Bryan Caplan in the book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.”

And unfortunately, we Filipinos have a long history as bad voters. We are known to elect and reelect, again and again, crooks, crooks we’ve previously ousted, idiots, and their family members.

It isn’t enough to vote. We need to vote smarter.

1. The first step to voting smarter is to register. (Duh.) Don’t know how? Head over to magparehistroka.com. As of press time, the Comelec has announced that they wouldn’t be extending the deadline to register—so you only have until Sept. 30 to do it.

And don’t just register, actually show up on the day of the elections ready to make your vote count. In 2019, one-fourth of registered voters did not vote in the midterm elections. Don’t waste your vote.

There is no such thing as not voting, said writer David Foster Wallace. He wrote: “You either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”

2. Realize that your one vote does count. “We need to remember the power of every single Filipino. Kailangang maisamulat natin yan sa lahat ng ating mga kababayan lalo na sa kabataan,” said Ronald Mendoza, dean of the Ateneo School of Government. When you embrace the idea that your vote counts, you will see it as the responsibility it is and prepare for it like you should.

3. Do your homework. The elections are not a time for cramming. The time to start paying attention was yesterday. But today is okay, too. It’s not too late. Talk to your friends and family members about your candidates and listen to what they have to say too. Intelligent discussion is important.

4. Separate fact from fiction. This is crucial in a time of fake news and propaganda, when it’s so easy to fool even supposedly smart people into believing something skewed or completely made up. Choose your sources of information wisely. Look for voices you can trust. Don’t believe everything you read and hear. Verify, verify, verify.

5. Vote critically. You know how critical you are when you’re watching the question and answer portion of beauty pageants or when a book you like was adapted into a movie or when your food delivery guy screws up your order? You should even be more critical of the people you’re voting for.

Something isn’t right when you expect more from beauty queens, filmmakers and Grab guys than you do from the potential leaders of your country. Don’t vote for a name just because it’s familiar. Don’t vote for someone just because they’re popular. “

Voting is not a horse race, you’re not going there thinking, ‘Gee, I gotta pick the winner so I can brag to my friends, oh, I picked so-and-so and he or she won,’” said former pro wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura.

Don’t vote for someone just because they’re charming. You know who else was reported to be really charming? Charles Manson and Ted Bundy.

Don’t vote for someone just because you also voted for their parents. Electoral seats are not a birthright—government positions aren’t crowns to be passed on. They are not Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles. And please, for the love of God and all the heroes who fought for our democracy, don’t vote for someone just because they entertained you with a song and dance.

6. Know the difference between promises and performance. “They keep promising change but they don’t really change anything. Habang pina-promise nila yung change, andami nilang kamag-anak na tumatakbo sa pulitika. At ang dami nilang kamag-anak na yumayaman habang nagtatagal sa pulitika,” said Mendoza.

It’s so easy to make all kinds of promises during the campaign period. It’s like courtship—politicians will promise you the moon and the stars to get your vote. What you need to be looking at is their track record. What have they actually done? Pay attention to action, not words.

7. Ask yourself, “What did they do during the pandemic?” COVID was a true test of leadership. How each candidate handled the pandemic tells us so much about them.

Did they have their priorities straight? Were they plastering their names on donations paid by taxpayers? Were they jumping the line to get tested? Were they being completely stupid and reckless and violating quarantine rules, putting other people at risk?

Did they turn the pandemic into yet another opportunity to siphon cash into their already overloaded pockets? Or did they actually do their part in trying to make people’s lives better during a really difficult time?

8. “Utang na loob” should never be the basis of your vote. Remember that when your politician does something good for your community or even your family, what they spent isn’t coming out of their own pockets—which is why there’s no excuse for all those tarps with their names and faces.

Mendoza said, “We want a system na hindi epal. Hindi personalistic. Taxpayer ang tumutulong sa kapwa niya Pilipino. So kung nabigyan ka ng scholarship, kung nabigyan ka ng social protection or ayuda, yan ay resources na galing din sa kapwa mo Pilipino. Kung gusto mo tumanaw ng utang na loob, tumanaw ka ng utang na loob sa lahat ng kapwa mo Pilipino, mga kasama mo sa komunidad, mga kasama natin dito sa bansa na ito at lahat ng mga OFW na nagbabayad ng buwis. Dapat manaig yan doon sa tradisyunal na pananaw na politiko ang tumutulong sa’yo. Yun namang politiko hindi naman pera nya yung ginagasta nya eh. Ang ginagasta nun, pera nating lahat dahil nagbayad tayo ng buwis.”

9. You can be as forgiving as you want to be in all aspects of your life but not when it comes to choosing your government officials. Filipinos can be too forgiving and too forgetful and so politicians think they can keep making fools of us. If an elected official has already screwed the country over and revealed their true horrific colors, say “never again” and vote for someone else.

10. Prepare your cheat sheet of chosen candidates and bring it with you on the day of the elections so you don’t panic when the ballot is in front of you. May your list of candidates be full of names that will do good and do well not just for you but for the whole country.

When choosing candidates, Mendoza said, “Don’t just think of yourself. Think of the future generation. The children. If we make the wrong decisions, it’s the children who will be paying for those mistakes. It’s so easy to say our leaders need to change but the first thing that should change is how we choose the leaders we are voting for.”

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Why Filipinos vote the way they do

While a good number of thoughtful Filipinos believe that the May 2022 presidential election is a watershed moment for our country and for generations to come — one that demands the most careful reflection about the kind of nation we want to be — this is not necessarily how the majority of voters think about this election, or other elections for that matter.

All elections are relational in nature — meaning, their importance depends on how a voter regards his/her vote in relation to the practicalities of their daily lives. Some voters simply don’t care enough to take the trouble of registering and going to the polls. Others strictly follow the “guidance” of their religious leaders as a matter of duty. For the vast majority, especially at the local level where politics is much more intense, elections are mainly a time for choosing which patronage network they identify with.

This manifest identification is arguably of greater value to them than the cash they may receive on voting day. Seen in this context, money may be offered, and accepted, not as a bribe, but as a token of a more enduring relationship. This depiction, which indeed may be buttressed by rationalizations of all kinds, is easier on the conscience.

The patronage networks I’m talking about here are local support systems kept alive all year round by barangay and “pook” leaders, municipal and city councilors, mayors, and district representatives. They are held together at the top by dominant political families and business blocs, and the whole array of private enterprises (both legal and illegal) and public agencies they control.

In provinces like Pampanga, where gambling operations of long standing have fused seamlessly with political coalitions, it is not easy to tell the difference between public service and private charity. In both systems, access is determined by patronage relations.

The dominant alliance of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the Pineda family (that has controlled the governor’s office since 2010) is a case in point. GMA connects the Pinedas to the levers of power in the national government, and, in return, the Pinedas maintain the patronage network that sustains the political fortunes of the former president and her family in the home province.

We are not just talking of the proceeds from small-time “jueteng” or its legal incarnation, the small town lottery or STL. The same operators have long branched out to the more highly profitable virtual “sabong” (cockfights), which rakes in billions in daily bets, while sharing a portion of the earnings with the government. For all the pernicious effects this new form of gambling has had on the lives of bettors in the poorest communities, President Duterte has refused to ban it because of the revenue it generates.

Above the level of the local community — say, at the senatorial and presidential levels — the search for affinity typically follows linguistic lines. Filipino voters still prefer to vote for their kind. Despite all claims to modernity, we remain basically tribal. Which is why the old political formula of recruiting presidential tandems from the major regional linguistic groups remains relevant.

It is in the major urbanized cities, where ethnic identities converge and dissolve, that we may find the ideal independent voter who bases his/her choices on a careful scrutiny of candidates’ qualifications, personal integrity, relevant experience, past performance, and political platform. Still, even in such settings, the quest for connection or affinity never completely disappears.

I know of some educated voters who cannot imagine not supporting the candidacies of people they personally know and relate to, even when these candidates openly endorse presidential bets who represent everything they oppose. This willful blindness to issues and to visions of a better society is what makes our politics so hopelessly myopic and personal.

But that is just my view as a political observer. In many ways, every voter is also an observer who justifies the choices he or she makes according to criteria that he/she may or may not be fully aware of. Whatever they are, such criteria never appear in surveys. I have always wondered, for instance, what type of logic governs the senatorial rankings reported in this year’s pre-election surveys. My guess is that these preferences are more likely based on the emotional disposition of survey respondents than on any rigorous calculation of the kind of Senate our country needs at this time.

The same applies to the results of pre-election surveys for the presidency. Are we to take these results—for example, the more than 50 percent share registered by candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in all the surveys these past few months—as proof that the Filipino people have forgotten and forgiven all the atrocities, abuse of power, and corruption that led to the ouster of the Marcos dictatorial regime in 1986? I don’t think so.

As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu succinctly puts it, “nothing more inadequately expresses the state of opinion than a percentage.” This is even more so when randomly chosen individuals are asked whom they would vote for if elections were held then and there. How much thought do they give to their answers within the time allotted to them?

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The point is: elections are less about public opinion than they are about hidden feelings and latent dispositions that cannot easily be formulated in a coherent way — or countered by appeal to facts.

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Importance of Voting Essay | Essay on Importance of Voting for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Importance of Voting Essay: A concept is well known by all democratic nations since most of the things are decided with elections. Different governors, mayors, judges, and presidents are all selected by the general population through the voting system, or else they are decided upon by the elected officials.

I personally believe that everyone should vote as everyone has a different opinion and in our Indian democracy we have the ability to choose who can preside over in the office, this also gives us an opportunity to have a say in this political world. The entire purpose of a democracy is to be able to have a say in the political scenario and this is to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and this is what makes up a democracy with everyone participating in it.

From a lot of the statistics, it is a known fact that young people don’t vote especially from the age ranging from 18 to 24. We can have different beliefs but this doesn’t mean you remove yourself from the electoral process. On hearing these statistics I was completely shocked because naturally, people tend to assume that everyone votes but that is not the case.

You can also find more Essay Writing articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Importance of Voting for Students and Kids in English

Voting can be defined as a way of expressing one’s own preference or opinion. This is important as everyone can get a say in the crazy political world we live in and that is what makes up a democracy.

Short Essay on Importance of Voting 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Importance of Voting is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Citizens of the country constantly complain about how our political climate is bad and worsening day by day and the honest truth is we have a chance to change it for the better. To make these changes we must vote by taking an informed vote and casting it as you should remember every vote counts.

It is mostly the youth of the country from age of 18 to 24 that tend to not vote and this causes a huge backlash in the system as these are the votes that we need. If you don’t like the way your country is running then change that by voting and don’t just complain.

“Voting is not just our right but our duty as well”, this saying goes a long way as it tells us clearly we have responsibilities as citizens of the country. To make sure we citizens run and take good care of our country we must put in our votes. A lot of the time people choose to believe that a single vote won’t make much of a difference but that is far from the truth and people must realize it as soon as possible.

Your choice of voting can have extreme consequences on the people from around the world who mostly do not have the right to vote. We must realize that a lot of the lawmakers are responsible for the various policies, laws, and infrastructure of the country for the future years and we are responsible for how these policies, law, and infrastructure is to turn out by voting.

A lot of people in other countries like Afghanistan cannot vote and some even die fighting for this very right. Most war-stricken countries have had their first elections in recent years even though most of the time they are threatened by the Taliban and certain terrorists. Superpower nation like America set certain policies which can have far-reaching impacts on countries that don’t have the same freedom as freedom of expression or the right to votes.

Long Essay on Importance of Voting 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Importance of Voting is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

The process by which people can express their political opinion is known as voting. Citizens of the country express their political opinion by choosing the desired political leader. This political leader, if he is a lawmaker, will have a huge impact on the way the country will presently run and also in the future, so to make sure we choose the right leader in a time when the political climate is constantly changing and we should be responsible citizens and cast our vote.

It is important to understand that election acts as a pillar for democracy because when all else fails we can still choose the right person to run the country. By not choosing the right leader a lot of people can be affected in the sense it can have far-reaching consequences on people who have nothing to do with our country. So we must understand that voting for the right person can have an impact all around us and can affect our country for a very long time. An election makes sure that the government is of the people, for the people, and by the people.

In an election, it is important to have suffrage which is the right to vote in elections. In India, the age of voting is attainable only at the age of 18, and in most countries where people have the right to vote have almost the same age limit. The electorate usually never includes the entire population. This question of how to have the privilege of voting is quite important. A very notable characteristic of elections is the nomination of a person. The nomination is the process of officially suggesting somebody for the public office and after the testimonials and endorsements are the various public statements that can help support a candidate’s nomination.

The electoral systems play a very vital role in the election. The electoral system includes the voting system and constitution arrangements. This is the process that converts a voting system into a proper political decision which can have long term effects on the country and its people.

In the process of voting the first step is the tally of votes. This is the use of the different ballot and counting systems. After this step, the result is determined based on the tally. Usually, the categorization of these systems can be majoritarian or proportional. Once the tally is over the person with the most tally wins the election. Elected officials are responsible to the people of the country so during different periods they must return to their voters, this is done so the elected officials can seek mandate so they can continue in office. Elections are conducted during fixed intervals of time. Elections can have far-reaching impacts on different parts of the world.

Over the recent past, it has become quite common to talk bad about the current elected leader of any legislative assembly or parliament. At the end of the day, the fault-finding comes down to what’s wrong with the system and how democracy isn’t functioning how it should. However, when speculating all the problems it never really bottles down to what the people can do to strengthen the system and bring change to it. Just as it is the responsibility of the elected leader to provide for the people of the country, we need the people to do our job and correct the leader by making sure he represents the right things and this can be done so by selecting the right candidate.

The right to vote is one of the few pillars of democracy. Therefore it is important that one must vote if he is able to and contribute to the country. A citizen shouldn’t find a reason as to not vote as it must be a compulsive duty and must come from within. Citizens of the country constantly complain about how our political climate is bad and worsening day by day and the honest truth is we have a chance to change it for the better.

To make these changes we must vote by taking an informed vote and casting it as you should remember every vote counts. I personally believe that everyone should vote as everyone has a different opinion and in our Indian democracy we have the ability to choose who can preside over in the office, this also gives us an opportunity to have a say in this political world.

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Essay on Election for Students and Children

500+ words essay on election.

Election is the process through which people can express their political opinion. They express this opinion by public voting to choose a political leader . Furthermore, this political leader would have authority and responsibility. Most noteworthy, Election is a formal group decision making the process. Also, the selected political leader would hold public office. The election is certainly a vital pillar of democracy. This is because; Election ensures that the government is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Characteristics of Election

First of all, suffrage is an important part of Election . Most noteworthy, suffrage refers to the right to vote in Elections. The question of who may vote is certainly an important issue. The electorate probably never includes the entire population. Almost all countries prohibit individuals under the age of majority from voting. For example, in India, the age of majority is attainable at the age of 18 years.

The nomination of a candidate is also an important characteristic of Election. This means to officially suggest someone for Election. Nomination refers to the process of selecting a candidate for election to a public office. Furthermore, endorsements or testimonials are public statements to support a candidate’s nomination.

Another essential characteristic of Election is electoral systems. Electoral systems refer to detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems. Furthermore, detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems convert the vote into a political decision.

The first step is the tally of votes. For this purpose, there is the use of various vote counting systems and ballot. Then comes the determination of the result on the basis of the tally. Also, the categorization of most systems is as either proportional or majoritarian.

Scheduling refers to arranging and controlling of Elections. Elected officials are accountable to the people. Therefore, they must return to the voters at regular intervals of time. Elected officials must do that so as to seek a mandate to continue in office. Above all, most countries arrange elections at fixed regular intervals.

An election campaign is also an integral part of Election. Election campaign refers to an organized effort to positively influence the decision making of a particular group. Consequently, politicians compete with each other by trying to woo more and more individuals.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Importance of Election

First of all, the Election is a peaceful and efficient way of choosing political leaders. Furthermore, citizens of a Nation choose a leader by casting their votes. In this way, the citizens are able to choose an individual whose views appeal to them most. Hence, people are able to exercise their will in political leadership.

An election is an excellent opportunity for people to express their resentment. Most noteworthy, if people are unhappy with a particular leadership, then they can remove it from power. People can certainly replace an undesirous leadership with a better alternative through Election.

The election is a handsome opportunity for political participation. Furthermore, it is a way by which new issues can be raised in public. In most democratic countries, common citizens are allowed to contest elections independently.

Consequently, a citizen could introduce reforms which are not any political party’s agenda. Also, in most democratic countries, a citizen could form a new political party to contest Election.

Election helps keep the power of political leaders in check. The ruling parties cannot afford to do any wrongdoing to the public due to the risk of losing Election. Hence, Election serves as an efficient power check and control for those in the ruling power.

To sum it up, Election is the symbol of political freedom. Most noteworthy, it is the tool which puts authority in the hands of common people. Democracy certainly would be non-functional without it. People must realize the value of Elections and come out in large numbers to vote.

Q1 What are electoral systems?

A1 Electoral systems are detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems. These detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems convert the vote into a political decision.

Q2 How Election helps keep the power of the political leaders in check?

A2 Elections certainly help keep the power of the political leaders in check. This is because political leaders cannot afford to do any wrongdoing to the public due to the risk of losing Election

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Tim Walz was the safe VP pick

But he probably won't give Harris an electoral boost.

In the end, Vice President Kamala Harris made the safe choice.

On Tuesday morning, the Democratic presidential nominee tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate. The 60-year-old, white, male former teacher, Army National Guardsman and congressman isn't a history-making pick (although he is the first Democratic presidential or vice-presidential nominee since 1980 who didn't attend law school!), nor will he offer a critical swing-state boost. But unless there are unknown skeletons in his closet, he probably satisfies the first rule of the veepstakes: Do no harm .

Walz has a strong resume for a VP pick. He was a geography teacher at Mankato West High School, where he was the faculty adviser for the gay-straight alliance and led the high school football team to a state championship. In 2006, he defeated an incumbent Republican representative in Minnesota's 1st District and spent 12 years in the House cultivating a center-left voting record : According to VoteView, he was consistently more liberal than about 60 percent of his fellow House members. With the exception of his defense of gun rights (which were popular in his rural district), he was generally a reliable liberal vote.

Since being elected governor in 2018, though, Walz has embraced his inner progressive. Especially since Democrats gained full control of Minnesota state government in 2022, he has presided over a flurry of liberal lawmaking: The state has legalized recreational marijuana , protected abortion rights , committed to transition to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2040 and passed a sweeping law to expand voting access . He also tacked left on gun rights , signing bills to expand background checks and make it easier to take guns away from people who are deemed a threat.

In other words, Walz seems to offer something for everyone in the Democratic coalition and little to alienate key segments of the party's base. That wasn't necessarily the case with the other two reported finalists for Harris's running mate, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Labor unions didn't seem thrilled with Kelly, who was one of the only Senate Democrats who didn't sponsor a major pro-labor bill . (He now says he supports it.) And Shapiro supports private school vouchers , a big no-go for many Democrats, and had come under scrutiny from progressives for his lack of support for the Palestinian cause .

That's not to say Walz doesn't have potential weaknesses. Republicans have already begun to criticize him for his handling of the 2020 protests over George Floyd's murder in Minnesota, when he did not deploy the National Guard until the day after local leaders asked him to. And there's a danger that such criticisms could stick: Nationally, Walz is virtually unknown, even more so than some of Harris's other rumored vice-presidential picks . Only four national polls had asked about his favorability before Tuesday's announcement, and on average only 23 percent of Americans knew enough about him to form an opinion.

That means both sides have an opportunity in the coming days and weeks to define Walz for a national audience.

But probably the biggest drawback to picking Walz is that he likely won't help Harris win the Electoral College as much as Shapiro or Kelly (who were both from major swing states) might have. Although Minnesota has been drifting toward "swing state" status , it is still bluer than states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. As a result, it's very unlikely to decide the election; any world in which Harris needs Walz to put her over the top in Minnesota is probably a world in which she has already lost all four of those states and, thus, the election.

But in hindsight, we shouldn't be too surprised that Harris didn't prioritize Shapiro or Kelly for their home-state advantage: It's actually fairly unusual for a vice-presidential nominee to hail from a swing state. Since 1996, only two vice-presidential picks have hailed from a state that was decided by fewer than 7 percentage points (the margin by which President Joe Biden won Minnesota in 2020) in either that presidential election or the one four years earlier.

The Harris campaign might be hoping that Walz can still help electorally in other Midwestern states, though. The congressional district he used to represent, Minnesota's 1st, is demographically similar to much of Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania in that it has a large population of white people without college degrees and voted strongly for former President Donald Trump. And Walz put up impressive numbers in this district; back when it was a swing seat, he won it by blowout margins, and in 2016, he was narrowly reelected despite Trump carrying the district by 15 points.

Walz also ran stronger than average during his two gubernatorial runs. All told, throughout his electoral career, Walz's winning margins have been 12 points better than a generic Democrat would have done in the same jurisdictions.*

However, unfortunately for Harris and Walz, this probably won't help much outside Minnesota. While 538 estimates that vice-presidential candidates are worth a 1.7-point boost in their home states, we haven't found evidence of similar boosts in neighboring states.

In other words, Walz wasn't the best pick if Harris's goal was to maximize her chances of winning the election. But historically, that's not what the veepstakes has been about. Instead, scholars of the vice presidency have found that a candidate's choice of running mate is usually about balancing the ticket (ideologically, geographically or, more recently, with regard to race and gender) or picking the best governing partner. The choice of Walz fits squarely into that tradition. So while it may not have had the most upside, it is a choice that has served many presidential candidates well in the past.

Mary Radcliffe and Cooper Burton contributed research.

*To calculate generic performance for a jurisdiction, we added the national House popular vote for the election year in question to the base partisanship of the jurisdiction Walz ran in (either statewide or his congressional district). "Base partisanship" is the weighted average margin difference between how the jurisdiction voted in the two most recent presidential elections and how the country voted overall, with the most recent presidential election receiving 75 percent of the weight and the second-most-recent presidential election receiving 25 percent of the weight.

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Guest Essay

Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

A flying cartoon figure borne aloft by a shopping bag on which is festooned a gold “B.”

By Eswar Prasad

Mr. Prasad is a professor in the Dyson School at Cornell University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of The Future of Money .

Crypto appears to be on the verge of mainstream acceptance. The price of Bitcoin, the original (and still most prominent ) cryptocurrency, hit an all-time high recently, while the Securities and Exchange Commission has loosened rules that make it much easier to invest in crypto. Donald Trump is vowing to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet,” and a new Republican-sponsored Senate bill demands that the Fed invest billions in bitcoin. Even Kamala Harris is reportedly more open than President Biden to crypto’s potential.

All of this might suggest that the crypto world is finally putting its scandals and unsavory reputation as the playground of crooks and financial charlatans behind it. Perhaps it will finally sweep aside stodgy banks and put power back in the hands of users, delivering benefits such as easier access to basic financial products and services, more competition and improved resilience.

Or perhaps not. Politicians’ newfound love of crypto probably has more to do with a cynical bid for young voter support and Silicon Valley cash than a maturing of a financially perilous set of assets. If anything, crypto today presents even greater risks to its investors and to our financial institutions than it did before. The fact that the Republican Party is publicly celebrating crypto to American voters could only make matters worse.

I am not a perennial crypto naysayer. Having written a book about digital currencies, I can tell you that Bitcoin has remarkable creative concepts and innovative technology behind it. Bitcoin and other such cryptocurrencies are in principle decentralized — which means they are not issued or managed by any institution or agency. Because the digital transactions of records are maintained on a worldwide network of computers, cryptocurrencies are in principle secure, invulnerable to manipulation by a small group and resilient to failure. As such, they should theoretically displace the need for trusted intermediaries such as commercial banks, which often use their power to limit competition and restrict broad access to financial products and services.

Unfortunately, some of these benefits have fallen by the wayside as cryptocurrencies gained in popularity and speculative forces in search of quick profits took hold. One major paradox of crypto is that there is now enormous centralization in this unregulated ecosystem. Apparently unwilling to put their full faith in a trustless technology, most users rely on cryptocurrency exchanges to hold their crypto assets and to trade them. The fraud perpetrated by Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, in which its executives treated investor funds like a personal piggy bank, highlights this vulnerability. And the government’s charges that Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, engaged in money laundering and other forms of malfeasance show how the problems of concentrated market power can pervert the noble aims of crypto visionaries.

Despite the problems illustrated by FTX and Binance, regulation is scant and centralization remains pervasive. The process by which transactions are validated and recorded on the Bitcoin digital ledgers is controlled by a handful of major consortiums that deploy their computing power to enable this process and reap the rewards . And in other parts of the crypto world, true democracy goes only so far. Large stakeholders have been accused of trying to manipulate rules , which are based on majority voting power, in ways that favor their interests over those of smaller players.

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Sverdlovsk Oblast

in Russian. or , is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. provide in the accompanying your translation by providing an to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is to the . .



Свердловская область


Coordinates: 61°20′E / 58.700°N 61.333°E / 58.700; 61.333
Country


Administrative center
Government
• Body
•
Area
• Total	194,307 km (75,022 sq mi)
• Rank
Population ( )
• Total	4,268,998
• Estimate	4,325,256
• Rank
• Density	22/km (57/sq mi)
•	85.8%
•	14.2%
	( )
	RU-SVE
	66, 96, 196
ID	65000000
Official languages
Website

Natural resources

Early history, medieval history and russian expansion, rise of the mining-metallurgical era, soviet ural, post-soviet transition, administrative divisions, demographics, settlements, ethnic groups, chairmen of the oblast duma, chairmen of the house of representatives of the legislative assembly, economy and transportation, sister relationships, notable people, external links.

any . Please help by . Unsourced material may be challenged and . ) )

Most of the oblast is spread over the eastern slopes of the Middle and North Urals and the Western Siberian Plain . Only in the southwest does the oblast stretch onto the western slopes of the Ural Mountains .

The highest mountains all rise in the North Urals, Konzhakovsky Kamen at 1,569 metres (5,148 ft) and Denezhkin Kamen at 1,492 metres (4,895 ft) . The Middle Urals is mostly hilly country with no discernible peaks; the mean elevation is closer to 300 to 500 metres (980 to 1,640 ft) above sea level. [9] Principal rivers include the Tavda , the Tura , the Chusovaya , and the Ufa , the latter two being tributaries of the Kama .

Sverdlovsk Oblast borders with, clockwise from the west, Perm Krai , the Komi Republic , Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug , Tyumen Oblast , Kurgan , and Chelyabinsk Oblasts , and the Republic of Bashkortostan .

The area is traversed by the northeasterly line of equal latitude and longitude.

Rich in natural resources, the oblast is especially famous for metals ( iron , copper , gold , platinum ), minerals ( asbestos , gemstones , talcum ), marble and coal . It is mostly here that the bulk of Russian industry was concentrated in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The area has continental climate patterns, with long cold winters (average temperatures reaching −15 °C (5 °F) to −25 °C (−13 °F) on the Western Siberian Plain) and short warm summers. Only in the southeast of the oblast do temperatures reach +30 °C (86 °F) in July.

You can help expand this section with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian . (November 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Russian article.

in Russian. a machine-translated version of the Russian article. or , is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. to this template: there are already 937 articles in the , and specifying topic= will aid in categorization. provide in the accompanying your translation by providing an to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is to the . .

The territory of the region has been inhabited since ancient times. Numerous sites of ancient people were discovered, dating from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age. The Upper Paleolithic includes the Garinsky site on the right bank of the Sosva river near the village of Gari , the site in the Shaitansky grotto, and the site in the Bezymyanny cave (X millennium BC). [10] [11] In 1890, the 11 thousand years old (Mesolithic) Shigir idol was discovered. [12]

A settlement and a burial ground in the Kalmatsky Brod tract are located on the right bank of the Iset river and date back to the Sarmatian time (from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD). They belong to the Kalmak archaeological culture. In the Kalmatsky Brod burial ground, the skeletal skulls were strongly deformed by tight bandaging in early childhood, which indicates the penetration of steppe ethnic elements to the north. [13]

There are numerous pictograms on the Koptelovsky stone, on the Oblique stone, on the Two-eyed stone, Starichnaya, Serginskaya, the rock paintings of the Bronze Age on the Neyva River, Tagil River (villages Brekhovaya, Gaevaya, Komelskaya), rock carvings on Shaitan-Kamen on the right bank of the Rezh river tied to indigenous Ural population, possibly speakers of a Ugric language . [14] [15] The Gostkovskaya Pisanitsa refers to the Middle Ages. [12]

Before the first Russian colonists arrived to the region, it was populated by various Turkic and Ugrian tribes. By the 16th century, when the Middle Urals were under influence of various Tatar khanates, the strongest local state was the Vogul Pelym principality with its center in Pelym .

The Russian conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in the 1550s paved the way further east, which was now free from Tatar depredations (see Yermak Timofeyevich ). The first surviving Russian settlements in the area date back to the late 16th – early 17th centuries ( Verkhoturye , 1598; Turinsk , 1600; Irbit , 1633; Alapayevsk , 1639). At that time, those small trading posts were governed under Siberian administration in Tobolsk . After the 1708 administrative reform, Verkhoturye, Pelym and Turinsk became a part of the new Siberian Governorate , in 1737 their territories were assigned to the Kazan Governorate .

During the 18th century, rich resources of iron and coal made Ural an industrial heartland of Russia. After getting control over Ural mines, the Demidov family put the region in the forefront of Russian industrialization. Yekaterinburg , Nevyansk and Tagil ironworks, founded in the 1700s to 1720s, soon joined the ranks of the major producers in Europe. Throughout the 18th and 19th century those newly founded factory towns enjoyed a status of special mining-metallurgical districts allowed to have a certain rate of financial and proprietary autonomy. During the 1781 reform middle Ural finally got its own regional administration in the form of the Perm Governorate .

When in 1812 the Russian government legalized gold digging for its citizens, Middle Ural became a center of gold mining. Entrepreneurs of the Perm Governorate also started the gold rush in West Siberia, soon Yekaterinburgers began to dominate the Russian market of precious metals and gemstones.

After the emancipation reform of 1861 , major Middle Uralian industries that were heavily dependent on serf labor entered decline, although it also allowed light industry to thrive. In 1878, Perm and Yekaterinburg were connected with a railroad, in 1888, railroads reached Tyumen , and ultimately, in 1897, Yekaterinburg joined the Trans-Siberian network . Emergence of railroad transportation helped to revitalize economy of Ural.

The Bolsheviks established their power in Yekaterinburg and Perm during the first days of the October Revolution of 1917. In early 1918 the dethroned Czar Nicholas II and his family were transferred under custody to Yekaterinburg. Local Bolsheviks decided autonomously to execute the royal family on July 17, 1918, to prevent its rescue of by the approaching White Army forces. Ten days later Yekaterinburg was captured by the Czechoslovak troops of Sergei Wojciechowski . For the next year the Anti-bolshevik forces took control over the region. On 19 August 1918, Provisional Government of Ural was formed in Yekaterinburg by a coalition of liberal and democratic socialist parties, it was supposed to serve as a buffer between the Komuch and Provisional Siberian governments. After the Kolchak coup d'état in Omsk in November 1918, the Government of Ural was disbanded.

In July 1919, in the course of the Yekaterinburg offense, Yekaterinburg and the surrounding areas were recaptured by the Red Army forces under command of Vasily Shorin . On the July 15th, the Perm Governorate was split by the Soviets and the east, for the first time in history, became a separate region, the Yekaterinburg Governorate. It was soon abolished and replaced by the Ural Oblast (1923-1934).

In the 1930s many industrial enterprises were established and built with the help of forced labour. [16] Local industry received another impetus during World War II, when important producing facilities were relocated here from the European part of Russia to safeguard them from the advancing Germans (for example, IMZ-Ural , Kamensk-Uralsky Metallurgical Works ). In the postwar period much of the region was off-limits to foreigners. It was over Sverdlovsk that the American U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers was shot down on May 1, 1960, while on a reconnaissance mission.

In 1979, there was an anthrax outbreak caused by an accident in a facility to develop biological weapons.

In 1993, Governor Eduard Rossel responded to perceived economic inequality by attempting to create a " Ural Republic ." Sverdlovsk led the "Urals Five" ( Kurgan Oblast , Orenburg Oblast , Perm Krai , Chelyabinsk Oblast and Sverdlovsk) in a call for greater regional power. They argued that the oblasts deserved as much power as the ethnic homeland republics . The Urals Republic Constitution went into effect on October 27, 1993. Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Urals Republic and the Sverdlovsk Parliament 10 days later (on November 9).

Population : 4,268,998 ( 2021 Census ) ; [5] 4,297,747 ( 2010 Russian census ) ; [17] 4,486,214 ( 2002 Census ) ; [18] 4,716,768 ( 1989 Soviet census ) . [19]

Vital statistics for 2022: [20] [21]

Births: 39,958 (9.4 per 1,000)
Deaths: 59,316 (13.9 per 1,000)

Total fertility rate (2022): [22] 1.56 children per woman

Life expectancy (2021): [23] Total — 68.79 years (male — 63.72, female — 73.80)


	Rank			Municipal pop.
	1			1,493,749
	2			349,008
	3			166,086
	4			120,778
	5			95,861
	6			80,357
	7			72,688
	8			62,908
	9			61,533
	10			60,979

Historical population
Year
1926	3,151,883	—
1939	2,331,176	−26.0%
1959	4,044,416	+73.5%
1970	4,319,741	+6.8%
1979	4,453,491	+3.1%
1989	4,716,768	+5.9%
2002	4,486,214	−4.9%
2010	4,297,747	−4.2%
2021	4,268,998	−0.7%
Source: Census data

There were twenty-one recognized ethnic groups of more than two thousand persons each in the oblast. Residents identified themselves as belonging to a total of 148 different ethnic groups, including: [17]

3,684,843 Russians (90.6%);
143,803 Tatars (3.5%);
35,563 Ukrainians (0.9%);
31,183 Bashkirs (0.8%);
23,801 Mari (0.6%);
14,914 Germans (0.4%);
14,215 Azerbaijanis (0.3%);
13,789 Udmurts (0.3%);
11,670 Belarusians (0.3%);
11,510 Chuvash (0.26%);
11,501 Armenians (0.3%);
11,138 Tajiks (0.3%);
9,702 Mordovians (0.22%);
9,358 Uzbeks (0.2%);

232,978 people were registered from administrative databases, and could not declare an ethnicity. It is estimated that the proportion of ethnicities in this group is the same as that of the declared group. [24]

Religion in Sverdlovsk Oblast as of 2012 (Sreda Arena Atlas)

			33%
Other			2.1%
Other			5.8%
			2.9%
and other native faiths			1.3%
			36.1%
and			13%
Other and undeclared			5.8%

Christianity is the largest religion in Sverdlovsk Oblast. According to a 2012 survey [25] 43% of the population of Sverdlovsk Oblast adheres to the Russian Orthodox Church , 5% are nondenominational Christians (excluding Protestant churches), 3% are Muslims , 2% are Orthodox Christian believers without belonging to any Church or are members of other Orthodox churches , 1% are adherents of the Slavic native faith (Rodnovery), and 0.3% are adherents of forms of Hinduism ( Vedism , Krishnaism or Tantrism ). In addition, 36% of the population declares to be "spiritual but not religious", and 9.7% is atheist . [25]

The most important institutions of higher education include Ural Federal University , Ural State Medical University , Ural State University of Economics , Ural State Law University , Ural State Mining University and Ural State Academy of Architecture and Arts , all located in the capital Yekaterinburg.

The oblast's Charter, adopted on 17 December 1994, with subsequent amendments, establishes the oblast government. The Governor is the chief executive, who appoints the Government, consisting of ministries and departments. The Chairman of the Government, commonly referred to as the Prime Minister, is appointed with the consent of the lower house of the legislature , a process similar to the appointment of the federal Prime Minister . But the Governor cannot nominate the same candidate more than twice, yet he/she can dismiss the house after three failed attempts to appoint the Premier. [ needs update ]

The Legislative Assembly is the regional parliament of Sverdlovsk Oblast. Until 2011, it was a bicameral legislature consisting of the Oblast Duma, the lower house , and the House of Representatives, the upper house . [27] Before the reform, members of the legislature served four-year terms with half of the Duma re-elected every two years. The Duma (28 members) was elected in party lists. The 21 members of the House of Representatives were elected in single-seat districts in a first-past-the-post system. The Legislative Assembly was the first bicameral legislature outside an autonomous republic, and the first regional legislature in Russia to elect members based on both party lists and single-seat districts . As of 2021, the Legislative Assembly is a unicameral legislature with a total of 50 seats, with half of the members elected by single-mandate constituencies and the other half elected in party lists for five-year terms. [28] [29]

Compliance with the Charter is enforced by the Charter Court. The existence of such regional courts in Russia, formed and functioning outside the federal judiciary, although challenged, has been upheld and persisted successfully in most constituent members of the Federation where they were established.

Until President Putin 's reforms of 2004, the Governor was elected by direct vote for terms of four years. Eduard Rossel has been the only elected governor (first elected governor for an oblast in Russia) since 1995 (appointed in 1991 and dismissed in 1993 by President Yeltsin ), re-elected in 1999 and 2003.

Since 2012, the oblast's Governor is Yevgeny Kuyvashev .

Name	Period
Vyacheslav Surganov	April 20, 1996 – April 2000
Yevgeny Porunov	April 26, 2000 – April 2002
Nikolay Voronin	April 24, 2002 – April 23, 2003
Alexander Zaborov (acting)	April 23, 2003 – July 3, 2003
Nikolay Voronin	July 3, 2003 – March 23, 2010
Elena Chechunova	March 23, 2010 – December 2011

Name	Period
Aleksandr Shaposhnikov	April 20, 1996 – May 1998
Pyotr Golenishchev	May 14, 1998 – April 2000
Viktor Yakimov	April 21, 2000 – April 2004
Yury Osintsev	April 6, 2004 – September 2007
Lyudmila Babushkina	October 2007 – December 2011

In the 1990s, the Oblast's population was distinguished by relatively high support for parties and candidates of the right and democratic persuasion. In the 1996 presidential election, Boris Yeltsin , a native of the region who lived in Sverdlovsk until the 1980s, won over 70% of the vote. In the regional elections in 2010 in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, United Russia received minimal support relative to other regions - only 39.79% of votes. [30]

Even though it could do with modernizing, the region's industries are quite diverse. 12% of Russia's iron and steel industry is still concentrated in Sverdlovsk oblast. Iron and copper are mined and processed here, the logging industry and wood-processing are important, too.

The largest companies in the region include Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company , UralVagonZavod , Enel Russia , Nizhniy Tagil Iron and Steel Works , Federal Freight . [31]

Yekaterinburg is a prominent road, rail and air hub in the Ural region. As the economic slump subsided, several European airlines started or resumed flights to the city. These include Lufthansa , British Airways , CSA , Turkish Airlines , Austrian Airlines and Finnair . Malév Hungarian Airlines used to be among those carriers but they had to drop their flights to SVX ( IATA airport code for Sverdlovsk) after a few months.

The Alapaevsk narrow-gauge railway serves the communities around Alapayevsk .

Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu province , Vietnam
Harbin , China
Vladik Dzhabarov , Russian cyclist
Andrey Fedyaev , Russian cosmonaut
Yakov Sverdlov , a communist revolutionary after whom Sverdlovsk and subsequently Sverdlovsk Oblast were named.
Church of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary , a building of regional historical significance in Staropyshminsk village.



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Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia

The capital city of Sverdlovsk oblast: Ekaterinburg .

Sverdlovsk Oblast - Overview

Sverdlovsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia, the largest region of the Urals, located on the border between Europe and Asia in the Urals Federal District. Yekaterinburg is the capital city of the region.

The population of Sverdlovsk Oblast is about 4,264,300 (2022), the area - 194,307 sq. km.

Sverdlovsk oblast flag

Sverdlovsk oblast coat of arms.

Sverdlovsk oblast map, Russia

Sverdlovsk oblast latest news and posts from our blog:.

26 May, 2020 / Unique Color Photos of Yekaterinburg in 1909 .

2 December, 2018 / Yekaterinburg - the view from above .

21 November, 2018 / Abandoned Railway Tunnel in Didino .

12 October, 2017 / Northern Urals: Manpupuner Plateau and Dyatlov Pass .

20 April, 2015 / Multicolored aurora borealis in the Northern Urals .

History of Sverdlovsk Oblast

The first people settled here in the Stone Age. At the end of the 16th century, the Russian kingdom gained control of the region. In the 17th century, the most significant stage of the initial development of this area happened, when Russian settlers began a massive advance to the east. In 1598, the first settlers founded the town of Verkhoturye on the territory of the present Sverdlovsk region.

Verkhoturye became the first capital of the Urals because of its strategic location on the Babinov road - an important crossroads of trade routes. Sverdlovsk oblast acted as a transshipment base between the central part of the country and the actively developed regions of Siberia and Central Asia.

The presence of strategic reserves of iron and copper ore, as well as large forest areas, predetermined the specialization of the region (ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, wood processing, mining, etc.). Exploration of minerals in the Sverdlovsk region began at the end of the 17th century.

In the 18th century, the Demidov dynasty founded several plants in the region that turned into large production and economic complexes. The local industry was characterized by a high level of technological development. The blast furnaces of the Ekaterinburg, Nevyansk, Tagil iron-making plants were superior in performance to the best European models of that time, and their products were the leading item of Russian exports.

More historical facts…

The launch of the Trans-Siberian Railway became a landmark event in the life of the Middle Urals, allowing large-scale export of plant products. Between 1920 and 1930, the Urals was able to once again take its place as the leading industrial region of Russia by strengthening its mining industry, creating new production facilities, developing energy and mass urban construction.

In the years of the first five-year plans, along with the reconstruction of old enterprises, several new large industrial facilities were opened: Uralmashzavod, Uralelektrotyazhmash, tool and ball bearing plants in Sverdlovsk, Uralvagonzavod and Nizhny Tagil metallurgical plant in Nizhny Tagil, pipe plants in Pervouralsk and Kamensk-Uralsky, copper smelters in Krasnouralsk and Sredneuralsk, the Ural aluminum smelter in Kamensk-Uralsky and others.

On October 3, 1938, the territory of Sverdlovsk Oblast was finally formed. During the Second World War, from July 1941 to December 1942, more than 2 million people came to the Urals region, of which more than 700 thousand stayed in Sverdlovsk Oblast.

In the postwar period, Sverdlovsk Oblast continued to develop as a major industrial center of the Urals. The industry of the region was a supplier of the most important types of machinery, products of ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, chemical, electric power, light, and food industries. Mechanical engineering and metalworking retained their leading place in the structure of the local industry.

Being one of the most important industrial and defense centers of the Soviet Union, the Sverdlovsk region remained closed to foreigners until 1991.

Beautiful nature of Sverdlovsk Oblast

Forest stream in Sverdlovsk Oblast

Author: Vlasov Pavel

Sverdlovsk Oblast nature

Author: Oleg Seliverstov

Sverdlovsk Oblast is rich in forests

Sverdlovsk Oblast - Features

Sverdlovsk Oblast received its name from its administrative center - the city of Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg). The name appeared on January 17, 1934, together with the formation of the region. After renaming Sverdlovsk back to Yekaterinburg, the region was not renamed and retained its Soviet name.

The territory of Sverdlovsk Oblast stretches from west to east for 560 kilometers, from north to south - for 660 kilometers. The climate is continental. The average temperature in January is about minus 16-20 degrees Celsius, in July - plus 19-30 degrees Celsius.

The Sverdlovsk region, being one of the oldest mining regions of Russia, is rich in a variety of natural resources. Today, the local mineral and raw materials base provides a significant part of the production of Russian vanadium, bauxite, chrysotile-asbestos, iron ore, refractory clay. The region is the main raw source for Russian aluminum industry.

There are significant reserves of nickel ores, precious metals, mineral and fresh groundwater, practically unlimited reserves of building materials. There are deposits of stone and brown coals, chromites, manganese and certain prospects for discovering oil and gas fields. Forests cover about 80% of the territory.

Sverdlovsk Oblast is an important transport hub of Russia. The Trans-Siberian Railway passes through its territory. Koltsovo is a large international airport located in Yekaterinburg. The largest cities and towns of Sverdlovsk Oblast are Yekaterinburg (1,493,600), Nizhny Tagil (340,700), Kamensk-Uralsky (162,500), Pervouralsk (117,700), Serov (93,900), Novouralsk (79,000), and Verkhnyaya Pyshma (76,400).

Sverdlovsk Oblast is known for its traditional International exhibition of armament in Nizhny Tagil, annual Russian Economic Forum in Yekaterinburg. Yekaterinburg is the 4th largest scientific center in Russia after Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and Novosibirsk.

It is one of the most important industrial regions of Russia. The structure of the local industrial complex is dominated by ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, enrichment of uranium and iron ore, engineering.

The largest enterprises of ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy are the Nizhnetagilsky Metallurgical Combine, the Kachkanar GOK Vanadiy, VSMPO-Avisma, the Pervouralsky Novotrubny Plant, the Bogoslovsky and the Ural Aluminum Smelters, the Kamensk-Uralsk Metallurgical Plant, the Sinarsky Pipe Plant, the Seversk Pipe Plant, as well as enterprises of the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company (Uralelectromed, Sredneuralsky Copper Smelting Plant, Metallurgical Plant named after A.K. Serov, etc.).

The most important enterprises of the machine-building complex are Uralvagonzavod, Ural Heavy Machinery Plant, Uralelectrotyazhmash, Uralkhimmash, Ural Turbine Plant, Ural Civil Aviation Plant. Uralkhimplast, which produces synthetic resins, is the largest chemical plant in Russia.

Attractions of Sverdlovsk Oblast

Coniferous forests and numerous rivers make the nature of the Sverdlovsk region attractive for tourists. There is a number of reserves and nature parks: Visimsky State Nature Reserve, Denezhkin Kamen National Nature Reserve, Pripyshminsky Bory National Park, Oleny Ruchi Nature Park, Chusovaya River Nature Park, Bazhovskiye Places Nature Park, Rezhevskoy Nature and Mineralogical Reserve.

Some of the most interesting sights located outside of Yekaterinburg:

Nevyansk Tower - a leaning tower in the center of the town of Nevyansk, built by the order of Akinfiy Demidov, the founder of the mining industry in the Urals, in the first half of the 18th century;
Cathedral of the Savior’s Transfiguration in Nevyansk;
Battle glory of the Urals - an open-air museum of military equipment in Verkhnyaya Pyshma;
Automotive equipment museum in Verkhnyaya Pyshma - one of the largest collections of Russian cars, special equipment, motorcycles, bicycles;
Obelisk symbolizing the border between Europe and Asia in Pervouralsk;
Verkhoturye - a historical town with a kremlin and a lot of churches called the spiritual center of the Urals. The Cross Exaltation Cathedral of the St. Nicholas Monastery is the third largest cathedral in Russia after the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg;
Mount Kachkanar located near the border between Europe and Asia. At the top of the mountain there is the Buddhist Monastery of Shad Tchup Ling;
Monastery in the name of the Holy Royal Passion-Bearers on Ganina Yama standing on the site of the extermination and the first burial of the remains of the family of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his servants;
Museum Complex Severskaya Domna in Polevskoy, 52 kilometers from Ekaterinburg - an industrial and architectural monument (1860);
Open-air museum in Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha - Ural wooden architecture and the richest collection of the Ural house painting;
Severskaya Pisanitsa - a monument with rock paintings and images of the Neolithic Age located near the village of Severka.

Sverdlovsk oblast of Russia photos

Pictures of the sverdlovsk region.

Sverdlovsk Oblast scenery

Author: Anatoliy Kislov

Bridge in Sverdlovsk Oblast

Author: Igor Romanov

Road in the Sverdlovsk region

Sverdlovsk Oblast views

Field of dandelions in Sverdlovsk Oblast

Winter in Sverdlovsk Oblast

Author: Isupov Sergei

Churches in Sverdlovsk Oblast

Abandoned church in the Sverdlovsk region

Author: Timofey Zakharov

Wooden church in Sverdlovsk Oblast

Orthodox church in Sverdlovsk Oblast

Author: Kutenyov Vladimir

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Sverdlovsk Oblast (Russian: Свердловская область, IPA: [svʲɪrdˈlofskəjə ˈobləsʲtʲ]) is a federal subject (an oblast) of Russia located in the Ural Federal District. Its administrative center is the city of Yekaterinburg, formerly known as Sverdlovsk. Its population is 4,268,998 (according to the 2021 Census ). [5]
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