Almost left my values at the desk.

I'm a little offended now because I didn't get that ticket in the mail that informs/reminds me that I'm entitled to vote in the local elections. Hello, I've voted before - what are they trying to tell me?

Anyways. I found a candidate after all, and since the university library, Linna (my mind always goes to "prison", instead of the writer Linna), had an advance voting booth, I figured why not.

I'd decided on the person already, but this morning I got an ad from another candidate. He had a special ad for people living in my area, and there he mentioned that he's against a certain project that nobody in the neighbourhood wants.

For a moment, I was tempted. Something concrete like that would be so easy to have as your basis in voting. But I couldn't leave my values at the desk (as some Parisian hotel allegedly asked their customers to do). I can see through his populist tactics.

He probably had a special ad for every region in this town (Tampere is a town, not a city, no matter how much they try to fool us), and had something to be against or promote there, and fish in votes.

Looking more closely at the ad, with lots of text and nice pictures, I didn't get that feeling that I could trust that person. I want the ad to somehow radiate honesty, humbleness and non-populism. Sometimes a dash of populism is refreshing, but only acceptable if the voter is made aware of it.

It's extremely annoying how some people underestimate my ability to see through the visual and verbal rhetoric of their ads. So I tend to go for people who have an endearingly clumsy, simple and bland ad, which nevertheless says everything I need to know. I found the candidate first, and only then did I notice that he's also from the right party too. Perfect.

The last time I voted, it was where I grew up. All the candidates were middle-aged and didn't really resonate anything in me. I voted for a person whose ideals I can't stand nowadays.

Voting is such an ambiguous issue for me. It's so hard to know whether you're truly having an effect on the things you want or not. Most candidates you don't even know until they start advertising, so you tend to know only what the ads tell you, or what they're telling you while they're campaigning. I'd think that they're not quite in their normal behaviour in that position.

Not voting makes me feel bad, because it's not like I'm protesting or anything. It would be out of laziness and ignorance and not-giving-a-shitness. But if I vote, I always feel like I could have known just a little bit more, that I didn't make as informed a decision as I'd like to.

I read about a study that people who are interested in politics and follow up on those issues on a daily basis and know a lot about what's going on, actually think (and probably know as well) that they have a lot of impact by voting. They know the mechanisms on all governmental levels, so they know which people can change which things and where, so they target their votes accordingly in different elections.

But if you're like me who doesn't really know that much, it feels like I'm shooting in the dark. It seems so likely that I might be causing more harm to issues close to my heart by voting than not voting, because I might be voting for the wrong person, simply because I didn't look that much into it.

So it's really more about being able to say that yes, I did vote. My conscience is clear now. But actually I think, hope, that the person I voted can't be too wide off the mark.