Elections Test Question

In today's political environment there is a lot that goes into being elected. In order to even start a campaign a candidate must choose their side of the political spectrum, or political party. They could be democratic, republican, or independent and this is determined by their choice of political ideals. It is not just choosing a party and running with it that gets a candidate elected though. Each politician needs money to run their campaign, without money their campaign would not even get off the ground. This money can come from many different places. One of which is a Political Action Committee, which is an organization that must contribute to at least five campaigns and can contribute up to 5,000 dollars. These organizations can provide this money basically just to help which ever candidate they would like to win. With more money it makes it much easier for a campaign to run and can make the campaign larger and thus outstretching to more voters and followers of the campaign. This money that they give the campaigns is labeled soft money because it is given to the candidate only once and is typically for a special purpose. Soft money is not the only type of money that campaigns receive as there is also hard money, which is given repetitively to a campaign. Other aspects that can effect elections are media bias and voter turnout. Media bias is the way the media slants their stories to favor which ever political party they are a larger fan of. This bias can often times effect the viewer's opinions of political candidates as well and thus forcing more people to vote one way or another. Voter turnout is the number of people that actually do show up and vote for the elections. With more voters obviously more opinions are given and more uninformed people vote. These uninformed votes are often times empty and could just be random votes and could cause a different candidate to be elected into office. In some cases low voter turnout is a good thing. It is good because it keeps the uninformed and people without a true opinion on the candidates out of the polls. Empty votes can cause a candidate that will not do as much for their position to be elected and thus negatively affecting the people. Throughout this entire process i believe that it is, for the most part, truly democratic because in the end it is determined by the people even though many different factors can help a candidate boost themselves to the top.