We live in the time with the most information available in all of history, yet with the seemingly endless ocean of data at everyone’s fingertips it doesn’t appear that we are becoming more knowledgeable or smarter. For instance, college students aren’t able to send in their absentee ballots because they don’t know where to get stamps. Hint: Look at the photo above.
According to Lisa Connors of the Fairfax County Office of Public Affairs in Virginia, college students are perplexed on how to send letters in the mail. If only there was a search portal that provided instant answers to life’s pertinent questions such as “Where can I get stamps?” Connors ran a focus group of college students who were interning at various county departments and noticed a trend on why they weren’t sending in their absentee ballots.
“One thing that came up, which I had heard from my own kids but I thought they were just nerdy, was that the students will go through the process of applying for a mail-in absentee ballot, they will fill out the ballot, and then, they don’t know where to get stamps. That seems to be like a hump that they can’t get across,” Connors told WTOP on Tuesday. Perhaps, if you can’t figure out how to buy a stamp, then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t be voting anyway.
“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost, unless you can’t find a stamp to vote,” President John Quincy Adams probably.
STUDY: Millennials won't vote because they don't know where to get a stamp for their mail-in absentee ballot… @CoriC_FOX5DC is looking into that 'study' from a Fairfax County focus group. @fox5dc pic.twitter.com/iZqXFWOCxd
— Van Applegate (@vbagate) September 20, 2018
“They all agreed that they knew lots of people who did not send in their ballots because it was too much of a hassle or they didn’t know where to get a stamp,” Connors revealed. This sounds more like laziness rather than a lack of know-how to get a stamp. While some may want to blame millennials for a lack of stamp knowledge, those cited were college students which would be millennials as well as Generation Z.
Many places have prepaid postage on the ballots, but the postage is not paid everywhere. There is extra attention on voting this year with the upcoming consequential midterm elections only 46 days away.
There’s even a website dedicated to informing the public where they can purchase stamps, including post offices, retail stores, gas stations, and even Amazon. This boggles the mind because if you’ve listened to any podcast in the last five years you are sure to have been bombarded with ads for Stamps.com.