Codeweavers may mean well, but they're flying in the face of good sense and experience. Virtually everyone I know who's disinterested in voting is also ill-informed. Apathy in the latter is why they're apathetic about the former. Push them into voting with gushy 'hope and change' rhetoric, scare tactics, or little prizes (as here), and they're likely to put into office someone with so little experience or talent that he does the country a lot of harm.

The 2008 election is a good illustration of that.

And to be honest, I respect uninformed people who don't vote. They're showing the integrity to not do what they know they can't do well. I don't do heart surgery for much the same reason. I skip some items on my ballot because I don't know which candidate is beter.

It's also true that votes by these group change almost nothing. Politicians rarely pay attention to the ill-informed because there's no downside to ignoring them. Young adults played a major role in electing Obama in 2008. They're the ones suffering the most from Obama's overt hostility to the small businesses who create jobs. Black people were another major voting block for Obama, as were Jews, and look how indifferent (or worse) he's been to both. Why? Because none of those groups are going to hold him accountable. Ignored, they don't become angry, they just sink back into their lethargy.

If you want an illustration of political success, look at the National Rifle Association and related organizations. In the 1960s and 1970s, it looked like the U.S. was headed down the European path with gun ownership regulated almost out of existence. But the NRA organized millions of people, informed them, and convinced them to vote their convictions in election after election. Eventually, even the most clueless of politicians began to notice that the ranks of their gun control colleagues got thinner and thinner after almost every election.

And the result is also a change in public sentiment. People notice that mass killers almost always target places where guns are banned (theaters and schools) and they when they don't they're quickly stopped. Efforts made to contrive rationale for imposing gun control (i.e. Fast and Furious) are getting increasingly desperate. The gun control cause lost because it depended on keeping people ill-informed. The defense of the Second Amendment succeeded because it informed and motivated. It'd didn't give away free ammunition.

Gimmicks like free software are a poor way to deal with our country's many ills. What we need are motivated, informed voters, voters who're smart enough to be skeptical about much of what appears in the news media.

I strongly agree with your overall point that the US badly needs better-educated and better-informed voters.

However, your attempt to suggest that the man who ended two treasury-draining wars, created more jobs in four years than his predecessor did in eight and turned Bush's money-sucking bank, Wall Street and auto bailouts into profitable enterprises has "harmed the country" is simply laughable, particularly when one looks at who did what when. The further implication that the Republican nominee would be better in ANY fashion for the country again suggests that it's not just "other voters" that badly need an education or to question their media sources ... to put it mildly.

There are plenty of areas where I haven't agreed with the current President ... but that's been true of every president I've lived under, with both parties. In fact there are only two presidents that I can think of in my lifetime where I have VIOLENTLY disagreed with nearly EVERY position they've taken, and while both are Republican I'd point out that there have been FIVE Republican presidents in the last 42 years.

Finally, your assumption that changing presidents changes much of anything also reeks of the very ignorance you decry. If Americans genuinely want progress, the President should be the LAST tick on their list. Presidents have very little power to affect big-picture changes (apart from one area -- naming Supreme Court justices). The problem with this country lies largely in the stunning array of incompetent (and in some cases outright deranged) Congress critters, governors and state legislatures.

Until Americans stop voting for the most entertainingly idiotic candidates or falling for the most obvious fear-and-paranoia ploys and instead back well-educated, progressive, forward-thinking and well-rounded conservatives and liberals, there will be no significant change in the country and a continuing overall degradation of the quality of life in the US. It's really that simple, though as we've seen positive change doesn't happen instantly the way it does on TV -- another attitude Americans need to ditch if they really want to reclaim the idea of actually being #1 in something (as opposed to just mindlessly chanting it, flying in the face of facts).