The power of hands-on learning is indisputable. But when it comes to investing your money in the stock market, however, making a beginner’s mistake can cost you more than just your self-esteem. Thankfully, the web makes it easy to practice with virtual money.
There are a multitude of online investment games like Investopedia and gnuTrade that play with virtual money, but not all of them are easy for beginners. Here are five of the best free (because you shouldn’t have to spend real money to play with fake money) online games for getting your feet wet.
1. Wall Street Survivor
Invest $100,000 in virtual cash via drop-down menu choices. A friendly cartoon version of stock guru Mark Brookshire helps you make your final decision by providing some rating numbers when you input a stock. These include a rating for survivor sentiment, fundamentals, technical and a Motley Fool class='blippr-nobr'>Ratingclass="blippr-nobr">Rating.
For additional help choosing stocks, the site has an impressive resource library that spans beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. Start with Investing 101 and consider taking advantage of the community forums if you have specific questions. Those who need a little help getting started can also choose to adapt one of the preset portfolios created by proven traders.
While the $100,000 competition is most popular, anybody on the site can create a contest. Prizes vary, but most often consist of competitive pride.
2. HowTheMarketWorks
Owned by the same company as Wall Street Survivor, this game is great for investors looking to gain experience with a new type of portfolio. In addition to stocks and indexes, there are options to experiment with Forex portfolios, penny stocks, mutual funds and short selling.
Beginners can execute market order-based trades in a “fun mode” without worrying about things like set hours, maximum number of trades per day, per stock and order expiration. A “realistic mode” amps up the complexity after they’ve mastered the beginner level.
Players can manage up to three stock portfolios and three Forex portfolios on the site at once. For each portfolio, they select a starting value between $100 and $500,000 and set how much virtual commission you are charged per trade.
The competition aspect is optional. General monthly contests give each player $25,000 as a virtual starting point. Other public contests include challenging restrictions like “short sells only” or “penny stocks only.” Users can create their own password-protected games as well, which is a feature that teachers find helpful for creating class competitions.
3. Young Money Stock Market Game
Young Money Magazine’s stock exchange game is easy to learn but also fairly realistic, which is a hard balance to strike.
Realistic aspects include a virtual commission that’s taken out of each trade, adhering to market hours and rules about how you can invest. Unlike many investing games, trades are made at a real-time price. Learning aspects include convenient help icons on key terms and an intuitive tabbed interface.
The site runs a monthly contest with a $100 (real) cash prize that goes to whoever gained the highest percentage. Players can also create their own contests or join other user-made contests.
4. MarketWatch Fantasy Earnings Trader Game
MarketWatch will run this mock stock market contest for a total of four weeks, awarding the winner of each week with an iPad. It’s on week three right now, but there’s still time to get in on the competition for week four.
You must have your selections picked before the week starts on Monday. The shares that you select are “purchased” at Monday’s open and will “sell” automatically at Friday’s close.
The catch is that all players can only use the 15 to 20 symbols selected for each week. The companies are selected by the game owner for companies that are projecting their earnings during each week. Lining up picks is easy — players simply drag the company’s logo to their trading card and designate if they want to sell short or go long.
Although there are some pros playing, this game is especially manageable for beginners due to the limited stock options for each week.
5. UpDown
Like Young Money’s game, UpDown has helpful icons that explain key terms for beginners. More comprehensive resources in the education center mercifully cover even the most basic of investing concepts.
Community features, like the opportunity to collaborate with a group and to see the most-bought and most-sold stocks, are also helpful for beginners. The “watch list” tool provides a convenient dashboard for monitoring potential picks.
UpDown sponsors a monthly contest that rewards players who beat the market with real cash.
More Business Resources from Mashable:
- 5 Lessons to Learn from Web Startups/> - 20 of the Best Resources to Get Your Startup Off the Ground/> - 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed/> - 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups/> - 10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team
Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, H-Gall
For more Business coverage:
class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
If you’re living in the United States right now, chances are you’re sick of hearing about elections and politics. That’s why I’m writing this today, instead of last week. I want to ride the coattails of that nausea and make a suggestion for the future of voting. The problem, I think, is that politicians do not care about you. They are ignoring you, and right they should. You don’t matter. Your issues don’t matter. Your concerns don’t matter. Politicians only care about one type of person, and it’s not you, because chances are, you didn’t vote.
[Image credit: Amelia E]
I haven’t seen official estimates on voter turnout this year, but I’m guessing it was embarrassingly low. I know it seems like there was more interest in a mid-term election this year than any year in the past, but that doesn’t mean much, because mid-term elections are very unpopular with voters. The last presidential election, in which record numbers of people voted, only drew 56.8% of the population to the polls, according to this page at infoplease.com. That was the highest percentage in 40 years, since 1968, when Nixon ran against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and segregationist George Wallace at the height of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam war. Before Nixon’s first election, voter turnout for the presidential election was just a bit more than 60%.
So, my guess is that voter turnout for this mid-term election will be less than 50%. When I make the assumption that you didn’t vote, I’ve got a better chance of being right than I do calling a coin toss.
It was the most expensive mid-term election in history, with candidates dumping millions of dollars into their campaigns. Some of the richest candidates lost, of course, but that doesn’t mean that money can’t help you win an election. Because of these expenditures, you might think that money is the most important thing to a politician. It seems like politicians follow the money interest, and that’s what controls their voting and behavior. But that’s not true.
There is one thing politicians want more than money. They want votes. Votes keep politicians in power, and power is the most addictive drug imaginable. Politicians can have all the money in the world, but that doesn’t guarantee they will win elections. To win an election, they need votes. That is why the only people who matter to politicians are people who vote.
The money is important, sure. But most of that money is spent on television commercials. It’s not used (hopefully) to buy fancy cars and big houses. The money isn’t a luxury, and political donations are not how politicians end up getting rich. The money from political spending pays for TV ads, and those ads exist to convince the voters.
I’m not making a campaign finance reform argument here, though I think the argument practically makes itself when you realize how much money it takes to run continual television ads during the long campaign season in this country. If we could take that incredible expense out of the mix . . . but I digress.
If we can’t fix the money problem in politics, maybe we can fix the voter turnout problem. One of the most annoying trends in this election was the constant bombardment of voting and political messages from all of my friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter. I’m not going to rehash them here, you can imagine the most partisan or the most tenacious of these, and I’m sure you had to deal with them yourself. Clearly, they didn’t work if voter turnout ends up as low as I predict.
One message did catch my eye, however. At first it annoyed me, but then it made me reconsider. Someone on my Twitter feed (I apologize to my readers and my source for not remembering who exactly) retweeted a messages saying something like: “If voting was as easy as signing up for Twitter, I would vote today.”
It makes you nauseous, right? You might argue that voting is as easy as signing up for Twitter, and more secure about privacy. But in fact, it’s not. Voting is an annoying process. It takes a lot of time. It’s a hassle, because too often there is a paperwork problem. I have been voting regularly for the past 16 years, and in the past two presidential elections, my voting eligibility was challenged at the polls by the workers there who could not find me on the voting rolls. I was registered, I had received confirmation, I had my driver’s license on me (once I even had my passport), but they still gave me trouble. In the last election, I had to submit a special ballot, and I was given the promise that if they ever found me on the voter registration logs, my vote would be counted.
Gee, I feel so . . . enfranchised?
Here’s my suggestion: we need to vote electronically over the Internet. Forget about voting booths, electronic voting machines and all the paperwork that accompanies them. We need to vote the same way we do everything else today. Why do we not trust the Internet for voting?
We trust the Internet for everything else. Voting seems like it demands the least privacy of all the private things we use the Internet to accomplish. I manage all of my finances over the Internet. I have never been to the actual bank where I have a credit card account, a car loan, or student loans. I manage all of those accounts electronically. I’ve received health records electronically. I send the most intimate and personal of correspondence over email without a second thought.
If we can manage our sex lives over the Internet, surely we can create a system for voting.
I don’t believe any of the obstacles to Internet voting are insurmountable. Security concerns about hacking and voter fraud, voter identification, all of the issues that would cause problems in a national election are problems we can tackle and defeat. It’s not like the paper balloting and electronic voting machines have been even close to flawless. How could we make things worse by moving voting online.
If we could vote online, we wouldn’t have to take time off of work to vote. We wouldn’t need to stand in line with our kids in tow, or stand in line behind someone with their screaming children. We wouldn’t have to explain to the stupid person handling the voter registration logs for the third time that our last name is spelled B-E-R-N-E, not B-U-R-N-S. Is that so hard to remember? It’s Berne, like the capital of Switzerland, not Burns. Do I look Scottish?
Again, I digress. I’ve tried to avoid taking partisan sides in this column, but if there is one theme we can all take away from the last election, it is that a great number of voters feel like their elected officials are not representing their interests. I don’t disagree, but it’s not because the politicians don’t care. It’s because you don’t vote.
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seiger The power of hands-on learning is indisputable. But when it comes to investing your money in the stock market, however, making a beginner’s mistake can cost you more than just your self-esteem. Thankfully, the web makes it easy to practice with virtual money.
There are a multitude of online investment games like Investopedia and gnuTrade that play with virtual money, but not all of them are easy for beginners. Here are five of the best free (because you shouldn’t have to spend real money to play with fake money) online games for getting your feet wet.
1. Wall Street Survivor
Invest $100,000 in virtual cash via drop-down menu choices. A friendly cartoon version of stock guru Mark Brookshire helps you make your final decision by providing some rating numbers when you input a stock. These include a rating for survivor sentiment, fundamentals, technical and a Motley Fool class='blippr-nobr'>Ratingclass="blippr-nobr">Rating.
For additional help choosing stocks, the site has an impressive resource library that spans beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. Start with Investing 101 and consider taking advantage of the community forums if you have specific questions. Those who need a little help getting started can also choose to adapt one of the preset portfolios created by proven traders.
While the $100,000 competition is most popular, anybody on the site can create a contest. Prizes vary, but most often consist of competitive pride.
2. HowTheMarketWorks
Owned by the same company as Wall Street Survivor, this game is great for investors looking to gain experience with a new type of portfolio. In addition to stocks and indexes, there are options to experiment with Forex portfolios, penny stocks, mutual funds and short selling.
Beginners can execute market order-based trades in a “fun mode” without worrying about things like set hours, maximum number of trades per day, per stock and order expiration. A “realistic mode” amps up the complexity after they’ve mastered the beginner level.
Players can manage up to three stock portfolios and three Forex portfolios on the site at once. For each portfolio, they select a starting value between $100 and $500,000 and set how much virtual commission you are charged per trade.
The competition aspect is optional. General monthly contests give each player $25,000 as a virtual starting point. Other public contests include challenging restrictions like “short sells only” or “penny stocks only.” Users can create their own password-protected games as well, which is a feature that teachers find helpful for creating class competitions.
3. Young Money Stock Market Game
Young Money Magazine’s stock exchange game is easy to learn but also fairly realistic, which is a hard balance to strike.
Realistic aspects include a virtual commission that’s taken out of each trade, adhering to market hours and rules about how you can invest. Unlike many investing games, trades are made at a real-time price. Learning aspects include convenient help icons on key terms and an intuitive tabbed interface.
The site runs a monthly contest with a $100 (real) cash prize that goes to whoever gained the highest percentage. Players can also create their own contests or join other user-made contests.
4. MarketWatch Fantasy Earnings Trader Game
MarketWatch will run this mock stock market contest for a total of four weeks, awarding the winner of each week with an iPad. It’s on week three right now, but there’s still time to get in on the competition for week four.
You must have your selections picked before the week starts on Monday. The shares that you select are “purchased” at Monday’s open and will “sell” automatically at Friday’s close.
The catch is that all players can only use the 15 to 20 symbols selected for each week. The companies are selected by the game owner for companies that are projecting their earnings during each week. Lining up picks is easy — players simply drag the company’s logo to their trading card and designate if they want to sell short or go long.
Although there are some pros playing, this game is especially manageable for beginners due to the limited stock options for each week.
5. UpDown
Like Young Money’s game, UpDown has helpful icons that explain key terms for beginners. More comprehensive resources in the education center mercifully cover even the most basic of investing concepts.
Community features, like the opportunity to collaborate with a group and to see the most-bought and most-sold stocks, are also helpful for beginners. The “watch list” tool provides a convenient dashboard for monitoring potential picks.
UpDown sponsors a monthly contest that rewards players who beat the market with real cash.
More Business Resources from Mashable:
- 5 Lessons to Learn from Web Startups/> - 20 of the Best Resources to Get Your Startup Off the Ground/> - 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed/> - 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups/> - 10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team
Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, H-Gall
For more Business coverage:
class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
If you’re living in the United States right now, chances are you’re sick of hearing about elections and politics. That’s why I’m writing this today, instead of last week. I want to ride the coattails of that nausea and make a suggestion for the future of voting. The problem, I think, is that politicians do not care about you. They are ignoring you, and right they should. You don’t matter. Your issues don’t matter. Your concerns don’t matter. Politicians only care about one type of person, and it’s not you, because chances are, you didn’t vote.
[Image credit: Amelia E]
I haven’t seen official estimates on voter turnout this year, but I’m guessing it was embarrassingly low. I know it seems like there was more interest in a mid-term election this year than any year in the past, but that doesn’t mean much, because mid-term elections are very unpopular with voters. The last presidential election, in which record numbers of people voted, only drew 56.8% of the population to the polls, according to this page at infoplease.com. That was the highest percentage in 40 years, since 1968, when Nixon ran against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and segregationist George Wallace at the height of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam war. Before Nixon’s first election, voter turnout for the presidential election was just a bit more than 60%.
So, my guess is that voter turnout for this mid-term election will be less than 50%. When I make the assumption that you didn’t vote, I’ve got a better chance of being right than I do calling a coin toss.
It was the most expensive mid-term election in history, with candidates dumping millions of dollars into their campaigns. Some of the richest candidates lost, of course, but that doesn’t mean that money can’t help you win an election. Because of these expenditures, you might think that money is the most important thing to a politician. It seems like politicians follow the money interest, and that’s what controls their voting and behavior. But that’s not true.
There is one thing politicians want more than money. They want votes. Votes keep politicians in power, and power is the most addictive drug imaginable. Politicians can have all the money in the world, but that doesn’t guarantee they will win elections. To win an election, they need votes. That is why the only people who matter to politicians are people who vote.
The money is important, sure. But most of that money is spent on television commercials. It’s not used (hopefully) to buy fancy cars and big houses. The money isn’t a luxury, and political donations are not how politicians end up getting rich. The money from political spending pays for TV ads, and those ads exist to convince the voters.
I’m not making a campaign finance reform argument here, though I think the argument practically makes itself when you realize how much money it takes to run continual television ads during the long campaign season in this country. If we could take that incredible expense out of the mix . . . but I digress.
If we can’t fix the money problem in politics, maybe we can fix the voter turnout problem. One of the most annoying trends in this election was the constant bombardment of voting and political messages from all of my friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter. I’m not going to rehash them here, you can imagine the most partisan or the most tenacious of these, and I’m sure you had to deal with them yourself. Clearly, they didn’t work if voter turnout ends up as low as I predict.
One message did catch my eye, however. At first it annoyed me, but then it made me reconsider. Someone on my Twitter feed (I apologize to my readers and my source for not remembering who exactly) retweeted a messages saying something like: “If voting was as easy as signing up for Twitter, I would vote today.”
It makes you nauseous, right? You might argue that voting is as easy as signing up for Twitter, and more secure about privacy. But in fact, it’s not. Voting is an annoying process. It takes a lot of time. It’s a hassle, because too often there is a paperwork problem. I have been voting regularly for the past 16 years, and in the past two presidential elections, my voting eligibility was challenged at the polls by the workers there who could not find me on the voting rolls. I was registered, I had received confirmation, I had my driver’s license on me (once I even had my passport), but they still gave me trouble. In the last election, I had to submit a special ballot, and I was given the promise that if they ever found me on the voter registration logs, my vote would be counted.
Gee, I feel so . . . enfranchised?
Here’s my suggestion: we need to vote electronically over the Internet. Forget about voting booths, electronic voting machines and all the paperwork that accompanies them. We need to vote the same way we do everything else today. Why do we not trust the Internet for voting?
We trust the Internet for everything else. Voting seems like it demands the least privacy of all the private things we use the Internet to accomplish. I manage all of my finances over the Internet. I have never been to the actual bank where I have a credit card account, a car loan, or student loans. I manage all of those accounts electronically. I’ve received health records electronically. I send the most intimate and personal of correspondence over email without a second thought.
If we can manage our sex lives over the Internet, surely we can create a system for voting.
I don’t believe any of the obstacles to Internet voting are insurmountable. Security concerns about hacking and voter fraud, voter identification, all of the issues that would cause problems in a national election are problems we can tackle and defeat. It’s not like the paper balloting and electronic voting machines have been even close to flawless. How could we make things worse by moving voting online.
If we could vote online, we wouldn’t have to take time off of work to vote. We wouldn’t need to stand in line with our kids in tow, or stand in line behind someone with their screaming children. We wouldn’t have to explain to the stupid person handling the voter registration logs for the third time that our last name is spelled B-E-R-N-E, not B-U-R-N-S. Is that so hard to remember? It’s Berne, like the capital of Switzerland, not Burns. Do I look Scottish?
Again, I digress. I’ve tried to avoid taking partisan sides in this column, but if there is one theme we can all take away from the last election, it is that a great number of voters feel like their elected officials are not representing their interests. I don’t disagree, but it’s not because the politicians don’t care. It’s because you don’t vote.
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seigereric seiger
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seigerThe power of hands-on learning is indisputable. But when it comes to investing your money in the stock market, however, making a beginner’s mistake can cost you more than just your self-esteem. Thankfully, the web makes it easy to practice with virtual money.
There are a multitude of online investment games like Investopedia and gnuTrade that play with virtual money, but not all of them are easy for beginners. Here are five of the best free (because you shouldn’t have to spend real money to play with fake money) online games for getting your feet wet.
1. Wall Street Survivor
Invest $100,000 in virtual cash via drop-down menu choices. A friendly cartoon version of stock guru Mark Brookshire helps you make your final decision by providing some rating numbers when you input a stock. These include a rating for survivor sentiment, fundamentals, technical and a Motley Fool class='blippr-nobr'>Ratingclass="blippr-nobr">Rating.
For additional help choosing stocks, the site has an impressive resource library that spans beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. Start with Investing 101 and consider taking advantage of the community forums if you have specific questions. Those who need a little help getting started can also choose to adapt one of the preset portfolios created by proven traders.
While the $100,000 competition is most popular, anybody on the site can create a contest. Prizes vary, but most often consist of competitive pride.
2. HowTheMarketWorks
Owned by the same company as Wall Street Survivor, this game is great for investors looking to gain experience with a new type of portfolio. In addition to stocks and indexes, there are options to experiment with Forex portfolios, penny stocks, mutual funds and short selling.
Beginners can execute market order-based trades in a “fun mode” without worrying about things like set hours, maximum number of trades per day, per stock and order expiration. A “realistic mode” amps up the complexity after they’ve mastered the beginner level.
Players can manage up to three stock portfolios and three Forex portfolios on the site at once. For each portfolio, they select a starting value between $100 and $500,000 and set how much virtual commission you are charged per trade.
The competition aspect is optional. General monthly contests give each player $25,000 as a virtual starting point. Other public contests include challenging restrictions like “short sells only” or “penny stocks only.” Users can create their own password-protected games as well, which is a feature that teachers find helpful for creating class competitions.
3. Young Money Stock Market Game
Young Money Magazine’s stock exchange game is easy to learn but also fairly realistic, which is a hard balance to strike.
Realistic aspects include a virtual commission that’s taken out of each trade, adhering to market hours and rules about how you can invest. Unlike many investing games, trades are made at a real-time price. Learning aspects include convenient help icons on key terms and an intuitive tabbed interface.
The site runs a monthly contest with a $100 (real) cash prize that goes to whoever gained the highest percentage. Players can also create their own contests or join other user-made contests.
4. MarketWatch Fantasy Earnings Trader Game
MarketWatch will run this mock stock market contest for a total of four weeks, awarding the winner of each week with an iPad. It’s on week three right now, but there’s still time to get in on the competition for week four.
You must have your selections picked before the week starts on Monday. The shares that you select are “purchased” at Monday’s open and will “sell” automatically at Friday’s close.
The catch is that all players can only use the 15 to 20 symbols selected for each week. The companies are selected by the game owner for companies that are projecting their earnings during each week. Lining up picks is easy — players simply drag the company’s logo to their trading card and designate if they want to sell short or go long.
Although there are some pros playing, this game is especially manageable for beginners due to the limited stock options for each week.
5. UpDown
Like Young Money’s game, UpDown has helpful icons that explain key terms for beginners. More comprehensive resources in the education center mercifully cover even the most basic of investing concepts.
Community features, like the opportunity to collaborate with a group and to see the most-bought and most-sold stocks, are also helpful for beginners. The “watch list” tool provides a convenient dashboard for monitoring potential picks.
UpDown sponsors a monthly contest that rewards players who beat the market with real cash.
More Business Resources from Mashable:
- 5 Lessons to Learn from Web Startups/> - 20 of the Best Resources to Get Your Startup Off the Ground/> - 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed/> - 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups/> - 10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team
Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, H-Gall
For more Business coverage:
class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
If you’re living in the United States right now, chances are you’re sick of hearing about elections and politics. That’s why I’m writing this today, instead of last week. I want to ride the coattails of that nausea and make a suggestion for the future of voting. The problem, I think, is that politicians do not care about you. They are ignoring you, and right they should. You don’t matter. Your issues don’t matter. Your concerns don’t matter. Politicians only care about one type of person, and it’s not you, because chances are, you didn’t vote.
[Image credit: Amelia E]
I haven’t seen official estimates on voter turnout this year, but I’m guessing it was embarrassingly low. I know it seems like there was more interest in a mid-term election this year than any year in the past, but that doesn’t mean much, because mid-term elections are very unpopular with voters. The last presidential election, in which record numbers of people voted, only drew 56.8% of the population to the polls, according to this page at infoplease.com. That was the highest percentage in 40 years, since 1968, when Nixon ran against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and segregationist George Wallace at the height of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam war. Before Nixon’s first election, voter turnout for the presidential election was just a bit more than 60%.
So, my guess is that voter turnout for this mid-term election will be less than 50%. When I make the assumption that you didn’t vote, I’ve got a better chance of being right than I do calling a coin toss.
It was the most expensive mid-term election in history, with candidates dumping millions of dollars into their campaigns. Some of the richest candidates lost, of course, but that doesn’t mean that money can’t help you win an election. Because of these expenditures, you might think that money is the most important thing to a politician. It seems like politicians follow the money interest, and that’s what controls their voting and behavior. But that’s not true.
There is one thing politicians want more than money. They want votes. Votes keep politicians in power, and power is the most addictive drug imaginable. Politicians can have all the money in the world, but that doesn’t guarantee they will win elections. To win an election, they need votes. That is why the only people who matter to politicians are people who vote.
The money is important, sure. But most of that money is spent on television commercials. It’s not used (hopefully) to buy fancy cars and big houses. The money isn’t a luxury, and political donations are not how politicians end up getting rich. The money from political spending pays for TV ads, and those ads exist to convince the voters.
I’m not making a campaign finance reform argument here, though I think the argument practically makes itself when you realize how much money it takes to run continual television ads during the long campaign season in this country. If we could take that incredible expense out of the mix . . . but I digress.
If we can’t fix the money problem in politics, maybe we can fix the voter turnout problem. One of the most annoying trends in this election was the constant bombardment of voting and political messages from all of my friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter. I’m not going to rehash them here, you can imagine the most partisan or the most tenacious of these, and I’m sure you had to deal with them yourself. Clearly, they didn’t work if voter turnout ends up as low as I predict.
One message did catch my eye, however. At first it annoyed me, but then it made me reconsider. Someone on my Twitter feed (I apologize to my readers and my source for not remembering who exactly) retweeted a messages saying something like: “If voting was as easy as signing up for Twitter, I would vote today.”
It makes you nauseous, right? You might argue that voting is as easy as signing up for Twitter, and more secure about privacy. But in fact, it’s not. Voting is an annoying process. It takes a lot of time. It’s a hassle, because too often there is a paperwork problem. I have been voting regularly for the past 16 years, and in the past two presidential elections, my voting eligibility was challenged at the polls by the workers there who could not find me on the voting rolls. I was registered, I had received confirmation, I had my driver’s license on me (once I even had my passport), but they still gave me trouble. In the last election, I had to submit a special ballot, and I was given the promise that if they ever found me on the voter registration logs, my vote would be counted.
Gee, I feel so . . . enfranchised?
Here’s my suggestion: we need to vote electronically over the Internet. Forget about voting booths, electronic voting machines and all the paperwork that accompanies them. We need to vote the same way we do everything else today. Why do we not trust the Internet for voting?
We trust the Internet for everything else. Voting seems like it demands the least privacy of all the private things we use the Internet to accomplish. I manage all of my finances over the Internet. I have never been to the actual bank where I have a credit card account, a car loan, or student loans. I manage all of those accounts electronically. I’ve received health records electronically. I send the most intimate and personal of correspondence over email without a second thought.
If we can manage our sex lives over the Internet, surely we can create a system for voting.
I don’t believe any of the obstacles to Internet voting are insurmountable. Security concerns about hacking and voter fraud, voter identification, all of the issues that would cause problems in a national election are problems we can tackle and defeat. It’s not like the paper balloting and electronic voting machines have been even close to flawless. How could we make things worse by moving voting online.
If we could vote online, we wouldn’t have to take time off of work to vote. We wouldn’t need to stand in line with our kids in tow, or stand in line behind someone with their screaming children. We wouldn’t have to explain to the stupid person handling the voter registration logs for the third time that our last name is spelled B-E-R-N-E, not B-U-R-N-S. Is that so hard to remember? It’s Berne, like the capital of Switzerland, not Burns. Do I look Scottish?
Again, I digress. I’ve tried to avoid taking partisan sides in this column, but if there is one theme we can all take away from the last election, it is that a great number of voters feel like their elected officials are not representing their interests. I don’t disagree, but it’s not because the politicians don’t care. It’s because you don’t vote.
eric seiger
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seiger
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seiger eric seiger eric seiger
eric seiger eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seigerSasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.
The blog site of allmusic.com. Music news, reviews of new songs, information about upcoming releases and tours, highlighting forgotten treasures, rediscoveries, and all manners of interesting music culled from the AMG archive.
On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, "Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. ...
eric seiger
