I spent the past few months freaking out about voting. I’ve been psyched to vote since 7th grade, and now that it’s finally time, I realized the reason why people don’t vote: It’s hard. I know that sounds like BS, but it really is! There’s a myriad of candidates, and unless the race is really high-profile and gets a lot of media attention, it’s very hard to know who’s running for what.

The internet is no help because it’s local, so there isn’t really a huge market for ‘Local Elections Overivew’ type things. And the newspaper tries, but it still just lists the races going on everywhere. Maybe I’m being a bit demanding, but I want something that says “If you life HERE, then you’ll be voting on A, B, C, and D.” I don’t think that’s asking too much.

At the end of the day I felt like I’d done a ton of work researching all this, and I was still not as informed as I’d like to be the day of the elections. In the end though, I felt like I knew my stuff on all the really important questions, and actually going there and voting felt cool. Even though they were scantron ballots, and even though I had to sit on the floor. I still felt cool, getting my civic responsibility on.