Voting and the American Presidency The United States of America, we are the champions of the democracy. Why is it then that our society is so inactive in our government? In the last presidential election there was a forty-nine percent voter turnout. In the most important and most publicized of all our elections, less than half of our citizens voted. On the other hand, in the recent Russian presidential election, over seventy percent of Russians voted. We are supposed to be the leaders of the free world and in a country where many of its citizens still call for communism, twenty percent more of its people voted. It is a disgrace that so large a portion of the American public does not take part in its most important election. Something must be done to the system to change that. In the following paragraphs, I will attempt to suggest possible changes that could increase voter turnout. One reason that Americans do not vote is that they feel they have little effect on the outcome of!
             the election. One way to change this is to increase the feeling of importance in the voter. This could be done by allowing the public to directly vote for the president. The American public is turned off by the fact that the popular vote does not elect the president. If an amendment was added to the constitution that changed the election process so that the president was directly elected by the American people, it would spur voter turnout. The public would feel more important, and therefore be more inclined to vote, if they knew that their vote would be directly involved in electing the president. Another reason Americans do not vote is that it is inconvenient. Why would someone bother voting if it involved taking time out of their busy work day to go down to the voting station to vote? I believe that there are two ways to combat this. First, I think that it is imperative that the government declare election day a national holiday. If the workforce had electi...