Election Blues (but not for the reasons you think!)

So the elections have come and gone. What a day in the history of the United States. But there is one thing that bugs me: how many people still don't vote.

(Note to the person I am about to speak of: I know I gave you a hard time already so don't take the following too hard. I just want to make a point of this!)

Someone I know, a college student who lives with five other students, informed me tonight that NONE of the people at her house voted. Not one of them. Apparently, because they are students away from home in a different state from their own, they thought they could not vote. This even though with an official letter from a bank, a receipt for paying rent, or any other item confirming their address in [state they go to school in] they could have voted at school. When I asked if they had heard of absentee voting, they said they had . . . today.

Okay, this IS a problem. The fact that these concepts are not clear discourages me; the young adults of this country, the people who will (hopefully) be voting for many years, don't know heads or tails of this system. We really need to work on this country being more transparent and more politically active. Now I don't mean people have to go out into the streets and protest (though maybe that would be a GOOD thing), but that if six colleges students didn't know they could vote, something is wrong. For my part, I didn't take the time to talk about voting with this person who is very close to me. We all need to work on this. We claim to be a democracy, but if so few people vote or so many from a particular group don't vote, is a democracy really what we have? We complain that this country is going to shit; there are cries from the left, right, top and bottom of the political spectrum, but we still have an abysmally low voter turn compared to so many other countries. See the table below for proof! (pulled from Voter Turnout)

Country	elections #	Turnout
Australia	14	95%
Malta	6	94%
Austria	9	92%
Belgium	12	91%
Italy	9	90%
Luxembourg	7	90%
Iceland	10	89%
New Zealand	12	88%
Denmark	14	87%
Germany	9	86%
Sweden	14	86%
Greece	10	86%
Venezuela	7	85%
Czech Republic	2	85%
Brazil	3	83%
Netherlands	7	83%
Costa Rica	8	81%
Norway	9	81%
Romania	2	81%
Bulgaria	2	80%
Israel	9	80%
Portugal	9	79%
Finland	10	78%
Canada	11	76%
France	9	76%
United Kingdom	9	76%
Ireland	11	74%
Spain	6	73%
Japan	12	71%
Estonia	2	69%
Hungary	2	66%
Russia	2	61%
India	6	58%
United States	9	54%
Switzerland	8	54%
Poland	2	51%

Come on, let's get with it people. You can not care about politics during the hundreds of days between elections. But please just vote . . . on that ONE day out of so many. I know it has been said before and is annoyingly cliché, but on some level I don't care which way someone votes. Just do it. I'll deal with what I feel is right or wrong later . . .