SUBJECTS

Civics, US Government, US History

GRADE LEVEL

8-12

OBJECTIVES

Students will see the importance of voting and that every vote counts.

LESSON PLAN

Context:

You can't win if you don't play. Election outcomes are determined by those who participate. Elected officials make important (often life and death) decisions about how our society will expend its collective resources and the restraints it will place on individual behavior. The drinking age, the age at which you can get a driver's license, and the amount of money your teachers receive are some of the decisions made by elected officials. In making those decisions, elected officials respond to people who bother to vote more than to those who abstain. Voting does not guarantee that one's preferences will prevail, but choosing not to vote denies a person one of they key tools of having a say in a democracy.

Does one vote really matter? It might. Consider the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, a contest between Republican candidate George W Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore.  Bush won the election with 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266, with one elector abstaining. But the election was shrouded in controversy over the 25 electoral votes cast by Florida. Bush, the winning candidate, likely failed to receive fewer popular votes than did Gore, but the 25 electoral votes went in the Bush column. Had the Gore campaign asked for a full recount of the statewide vote, later research indicates that Gore would have won the recount by a slim 100 votes statewide, giving him the victory in Florida and the 25 electoral votes necessary to put him in the White House.

The 2000 election was the fourth in which the electoral winner did not receive a plurality of the popular vote.

Some famous photo finishes in history. Political candidates do their best to turn out the vote, focusing, of course, on those voters likely to side with them. The congressional elections in 1952 provide one example.

Senator Everett Dirksen chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee during that election cycle. The NRSC was a political organization set up to retain and add Republican seats in the U.S. Senate. To help Dirksen achieve a Republican majority, the Institute of Fiscal and Political Education, New York, printed a brochure reproduced below. The purpose? To turn out the vote.

The brochure uses a comic book-like format to make the point that every vote counts. Notice that the text confuses the vote in the Electoral College with an individual vote cast during an election (see the insert in frame 5 regarding the Hayes-Tilden election).

Lesson:

 Step 1. Have students read the four-page document reproduced below. Ask them to summarize the basic message of the brochure and to assess the persuasiveness of the piece.

 Step 2. Students will Design a three-panel strip to illustrate the potential impact of an individual vote in the 2000 presidential election.

 Step 3. Either as a group project or as an individual assignment, students will identify a local or statewide election which illustrates the importance of voting. Election races that qualify include, for example, those where the anticipated result will be close and those in which the candidates are conducting “get out the vote” drives.

 Step 4. Students will write a 30-second statement to use to convince a friend to vote.

RESOURCES

 1. Some Famous Photo Finishes of History

 2. Link to “Why is It Important to Vote?”  http://www.congresslink.org/print_expert_vote.htm to learn more about the importance of voting.

CREDIT

Frank H. Mackaman
The Dirksen Congressional Center
http://www.dirksencongressionalcenter.org/
July 2012