Capstone Project – Oberg – Vote! It’s your right!

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The subject matter that I have chosen is voting. Voting is a fundamental right for the peoples of the United States of America. So much so that, since the creation of the United States Constitution, there have been four amendments that specifically address voting rights. In my Capstone project I want to address these amendments and their importance. I also want to address the historically low voter turn outs for federal, state, and local elections. The two media objects I am choosing for my capstone project are remixed video and animation. I am going to use the two media objects to separate the federal election information from the state and local information, while the website is going to give a general overview of what our rights and responsibilities are with regards to voting.
For example:
The Fifteenth Amendment prevents the government, both state and federal, from inhibiting a citizen’s right to vote based on their ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’ Now, while this addressed race color and servitude, it still did not allow for women to vote.
Due in large part to the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900’s, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting the denying of the right to vote on the basis of sex.
The Twenty-Fourth Amendment prohibited the requiring a poll or other type of tax in federal elections which was preventing people with little money the opportunity of voting.
The last one is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment which reduced the voting age to 18 allowing all those of majority the opportunity to vote.
So, as you can see, the right and responsibility of voting is so important that the Constitution was amending four times to allow all the opportunity to vote.
However, many people still do not take that opportunity. In 2008, just 56.8% of the voting age population turned out to vote. In 2012, it dropped to 53.6%, and those were presidential election years. In 2014, a non-presidential election year, the turnout dropped to just 36.3% for federal elections such as for congress and the senate.
This isn’t even taking into account state and local elections for representatives and measures that can directly face our lives.
This article isn’t to try and sway you from one side to another or to pick a particular mandate. That is for you to decide. However, if we all do our part in voting for who and what we believe will best help our society then we are taking personal responsibility for choosing who can best represent our needs. It’s that important.

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