How to be a Rational Voter by Ethan Carlile
Being open to new ideas
A big problem with voting and politics in
general is that people refuse to listen to other
ideas that may be different from their own.
Keeping an open mind and trying to
understand where others are coming from
may change your outlook on who should be
elected for the office you’re voting on. In Jill
Suttie’s article, “The Psychology of Voting”,
she describes numerous ways our feelings
change the way we vote. An interesting way
she pointed out Gratitude changing the way
we vote, she says, “voters receiving the
gratitude postcard voted significantly more—
two to three percentage points more.” This
relates to being more open to others because
of how we generally have more gratitude for
the people around us when we know more
about them. Keeping an open mind to
everyone will spread the feeling and hopefully
create a more diverse group of voters.
https://www.mindful.org/the-psychology-of-
voting/
Knowing where to get your information Part
1, where not to get info
In a world full of partisanship, it’s easy to get
caught up in all the biased news sources.
Outlets such as Fox News, NBC, CNN, and
other very common channels such as these are
easy to identify. Smaller ones may not be so
easy to point out it’s biases. Some ways you
can figure this out is by taking a look at the
articles as a whole, like the titles for example,
and see if you can spot anything within them
that could make the readers sway their
thinking one way or the other. Another way is
to look at where they are getting their
information from. Sometimes they’ll be more
easily to spot biased sources. Lastly, look at
some of the authors that are writing these
articles. If you look them up on Google, a lot
of the time you can find out more about them
that way.
Knowing where to get your information part
2, how to find the information
The difficult part of getting good information
is finding an unbiased news source. One of
the most popular, and my personal favorite, is
National Public Radio. However, it does lean
a bit left sometimes. What you’re looking for
in these sources is that they shouldn’t be
telling you what to think. In Ryan Dube’s
article, “Top 5 Unbiased World News
Websites Free From Censorship,” he also
claims that it’s censoring that makes an
organization biased. “News can be censored
either by the over-reach of government
entities or by a corporate stranglehold on the
editorial processes of news organizations,”
(Dube 1). Finding news sources that you
know aren’t biased by using the methods in
the previous section and sticking to your guns
is probably the best way to go with this one.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-world-
news-websites-guaranteed-free-censorship/
Knowing about who’s running
This is a big problem that America is facing
today. “About six in ten Americans say too
many uninformed people voting (60%),”
(Vandermaas-Peeler). This is a problem
because if people don’t know about what all
of the candidates stand for, they will only vote
for the ones that are most publicized.
Therefore, we must have unbiased media
sources. If we can get rid of all the white noise
around all of the candidates and just get down
to what they really mean and stand for, then
we can understand who we really want to
represent the United States.
https://www.prri.org/research/american-
democracy-in-crisis-voters-midterms-trump-
election-2018/