So, prompted somewhat by seeing too much of those atrocious TV ads featuring celebrities that I don’t recognise and the fact that I know waaayyy to many people involved in the whole ‘Rock the Vote’ thing I decided to look at the site run by these people. I appreciate what many of the people involved are trying to do but to be honest are they going to change anything? Doubtful I’d say…
Warning: Even by my standards this is going to be a rambly and disjointed post. Also its very negative.
The idea behind RockTheVote.ie is that come election day – which is just over a week away now, young people will go out and vote because its a good idea, or something. You see, while there was lots of talk about how ‘the children are the future’ and ‘young people’s voices need to be heard’ there is no really good reason this site can give as to why you should vote.
There are two major points at which this site falls down before it even starts. Firstly – its message seems to be that ‘all young people are retarded’; even the use of the words ‘young people’ is insulting. The design of the site and those TV ads seem to be more aimed towards selling sweets to small fat 8 year-olds than convincing new voters on the registrar and those who may not have put themselves onto it yet to vote. Ads that treat you like your a vapid moron are really going to work lads. Secondly – the money spent and the politicians taking the photo-ops that have been offered can’t hide one thing; Thursday voting. The simple fact is as the RockTheVote team themselves acknowledge, if its not weekend voting you lose an awful lot of the youth vote. Bertie simply ignores it in his blog (which to be honest I doubt he even wrote) while the opposition leaders use it as a handily-provided stick to say how bad Bertie is. Apparently, RockTheVote can’t campaign for Saturday voting (something to do with the way they are set up) and with that being the case – what’s the point of them being there? You might as well pray for cancer patients as try to convince young people to vote, it’ll have the same effect in the real world.
The same can be said for the blogs on offer. The leaders blogs are so vapid and lack any useful info they seem to be just ‘copy and pasted’ from pre-prepared statements from the parties. While there are some bits and pieces that are interesting you have to go looking for them and the sheer paucity of posts from the parties shows how they are not really that interested in the ‘young people’.
The ‘young people’s blogs’ are somewhat more interesting, in that they at least have some original thought and style. But again, there’s not a whole lot posted there and some of the posts are just ‘Sure, I don’t know anything about politics, why would I vote?’ with the always inspiring reply to that being ‘becuase its your right… or something’. They do hit it on the head though when they acknowledge that for many things like taxes and stamp duty and whether Bertie did do anything wrong don’t interest the majority of young voters. The lack of focus on issues that do effect young people is something that has (again) made the RockTheVote campaign rather pointless.
The whole thing also lacks any useful method of giving people information. It simply encourages you to vote but does not provide you with any real information (or even a method of finding information) with regards to the parties. In this case, whats the point? Is the idea that you go to the station and ask the person at the polling booth which person you should vote for? Compare it to the recent French elections where the youth vote knew why they preferred particular candidates – there was at least some vision, choice and most importantly difference on offer. RockTheVote offers none of these things, not the appearance of it or the means of finding out if there is diference.
There are things that do effect and would interest younger voters. These are things like poor facilities for socialising other than the pub, poor cancer care (not exclusively a ‘youth issue’ but ‘our’ generation are going to know a lot of people that will suffer it if the numbers keep growing – to the best of my memory, I’m on person number 10), drugs and suicide/depression are all issues that would mobilise young voters but the politicians have no interest in tapping into these groups.
Well, that’s not exclusively true. My own personal bet is that come election day the vast majority of those under 25 who vote will vote Sinn Fein and that’s because they do target and mobilise more youth than any other party that I have seen. Personally I don’t like that possibility but in the meantime, most young people won’t vote and if this is their introduction to voting I don’t know why they’d bother….
