With the exception of something life-threatening, if you are registered to vote by Nov. 2, there is no excuse not to cast your ballot.

I don’t care if you think you’re not being listened to, or that “one vote can’t change anything,” or if you don’t support any of the political parties on the list. You want to change those things, right?

You want to have politicians in place who will listen to you, you want to feel like you’re living in a democratic political system and you want political parties that you can respect, right?

Well, then (and I mean this in the nicest way possible): vote, dummy!

There’s simply no other (peaceful, legal) way to change the system.

It can feel pretty awful sometimes, having to vote for the lesser of two evils, but in a gigantic country like ours, sweeping change takes time.

Now that we’ve gotten that little issue out of the way – and all of you who are reading this and are registered to vote are planning to vote – let’s talk about good and bad reasons for the ways in which we cast our ballots.

First and foremost: revenge. This is a bad reason to cast a ballot.

I know, oh believe me I know, just how irritating the people running the country can be. And it seems like a really great idea to take a swing at them.

Don’t like Barack Obama’s policies? Think he’s not quite liberal enough / that he’s a socialist? Stinks to be you, because he’s not on the ballot this year. Voting one way or another is not going to get back at him in the way you think it will.

Instead, should you choose to vote out of a desire to “get back” at the president, you’ll effectively put the kibosh on the nation’s political debate, furthering it into crazies fighting crazies.

We don’t want that. Instead, if you wish to send a message to the president, utilize any of the options on the following website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact or just call 202-456-1111.

Suppose you don’t want to send a message to the president but you do want to change the policies by which our country operates.

Excellent. This is a good reason to vote.

A midterm election is an excellent chance to send people who follow the policies you support to Washington, because it’s ultra-local, yet you can actually change the lineup of the governing bodies of our fair nation.

The only way to do this, however, is to ignore any and all political advertising you have been seeing or will see over the next few weeks and instead try to track down policy statements on candidate’s websites, or read interviews with them in papers and online.

Look at real information to help make your decisions: the government has pages upon pages of raw and/or user friendly data out there about the way in which the country is functioning.

Talking heads will tell you that – to stay away from ongoing campaigns – the president is failing across the board at everything he wants to do – look at the data, look at the way in which the country set up to run and you will see that things aren’t quite as bleak as they appear.

What I’m getting at here is that you should not allow other people to make your voting decision for you.

Take in as much information from others and have lengthy discussions about everything involved, but don’t allow someone like me to make the decision for you.

Let me help, certainly, but I won’t tell you who to vote for.

For now, then, just remember the following: vote, you wonderful person you, and when you do so, do so because you’re voting for policies, for ways of handling issues large and small, that you can agree with.

You might not support one hundred percent of a candidate’s platform – such is life – but you want to be able to pick one platform over another and know why you’re doing so.

I will be voting on Nov. 2. I hope to see you at the polls.

Noah is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.