I always thought voting was cool.
I remember accompanying my parents to the voting stations and being oh-so-jealous as they got to put a thick check mark next to the person they trusted to run a country for the next four years . Back then I wished I was 18, had a passport (an ultimate form of an identification for any Russian) and could also vote.
I couldn’t participate in the last presidential elections in 2004 because I was only 17. Hearing my family’s joyful stories about hanging out at the voting booths made me pretty jealous (I was at school in the US back then and everyone back home clearly thought I was missing out). Now that I am finally over 18 and there is a presidential election this coming Sunday, I can go vote. I won’t.
I don’t have an absentee ballot (apparently, to get one I had to be in Russia exactly one month before the elections, which makes fulfilling my citizen duties a bit too troublesome and expensive), but my consulate claims I can just show up with my travelling passport. Still, I won’t even bother going to NYC for that. I am not a big fan of a guy who will be our next president (I can bet four years worth of my college tuition that it’s going to be him). The ballot will provide me with a choice of another three: A political clown who is only good at giving drunken interviews , a Communist (I won’t even bother explaining why I am not going to vote for him or his party – ever) and a young-ish candidate who doesn’t have a good understanding of how he would run a country. Since there is no “against all” or “abstaining” option (it was removed a couple of years ago), I guess I will just stay at home doing school work.
Midterms are wreaking havoc over here : (