Voter Behavior Essay

By taking a closer look at voter behavior one is able to better understand how and why citizens make certain decisions and ultimately how they vote come election day. During the election period it is common to hear individuals say that they are using their vote as a vote against a certain candidate or that they are voting for the “lesser of two evils.” An important question to ask is, why? Why do so many people find themselves choosing a candidate solely to keep the other candidate from winning a position in office? Many different theories come in to play when faced with this question. There is the idea that the media is both biased and corrupt which ultimately will effect the views and beliefs of voters and society as a whole. When a

They delved into the entry of Fox News in the cable television world and whether it had any noticeable impact on voter behavior. Between October 1996 and November 2000, Fox News began airing in about 20 percent of American cities. In total the study looked at 9,256 towns. Through their research, they found that Republicans, overall, gained between .4 and .7 percentage points in the cities that had aired Fox News. This may seem like a small effect but just imagine if one would apply this effect to cities across the entire country and the effect that this could have on thousands of votes (Media Bias and

Thomas Elliot wrote a journal on this in 2010. According to Elliot (2010): This voting system aims to emphasize, rather than electing the most popular candidate as most voting systems do, but instead not electing widely unpopular candidates. It does this by allowing voters to vote directly against candidates, rather than only for candidates. This paper shall explain the means by which the system operates, various traits it does and does not have, and how its outcomes in certain situations compare with those of other systems.

This type of voting could be compared to Cumulative Voting. It would work with each voter having a particular number of positive votes and then also a particular number of negative votes. They would then cast these positive and negative votes towards the different candidates. Positive votes would be calculated and casted the same way but in addition any negative votes casted toward that candidate would lower the candidates total score and therefore would also lower their chance of winning the given election. This type of voting could help to avoid an election where the two final candidates are both highly unfavored, such as the one this November between Trump and