By Robbie Bullis | City of Dewey, Walker County

Say, in a hypothetical situation, a candidate was able to trade his votes for the votes of others. Would this be… immoral?

Due to the small number of individual voters on the city level, paired with the large number of available roles those voters can take, Badger Boys State is particularly susceptible to this type of manipulation on the small-scale city level.

A situation arises where a large portion of the voting base is running for their own positions and just one particularly strong personality can easily promise his own votes to as many people as possible to maximize dedicated voters.

While this may not sound particularly damaging to the democratic system, it leads to a noticeable split. It separates the politicians from the non-politicians; those who are willing to trade votes, or to earn them.

It draws a line between the citizens willing to make deals and concessions to come out on top and those who attempt to befriend as many people as possible. These two styles of campaigning quickly broke out on the city level — with one group favoring deals and vote trading, while the other group would favor direct speech-giving and politeness towards their voters.

Something else I became aware of between this split in style was that those who were more willing to make deals were, by and large, far more willing to attack their opponents directly in speeches and highlight their own strengths. They did this while avoiding talking directly about the issues they hoped to represent.

Some even used their elections on the city level to act as a jumping off point for greater positions, often never even intending on maintaining their first elected position.

This shows a direct lack of caring for the position, and a style based more on making power plays than on genuine caring for their roles. On the larger county level many of these same politicians would use exaggerated speeches and gimmicks to highlight their strengths.

The inevitable conclusion of all this? Politics is treated like a power play, and a scale of personal strength, and often more qualified or more friendly candidates struggle to make headway.

All of this is oddly representative of real-world politics as well, and my experience here has given me a deeper understanding of the sort of “game” of politics.

The citizens who get furthest ahead are the citizens who are best at making deals, wield ambition everywhere they go and are able to show themselves as both strong and intelligent. Their success is a testament to their ability to understand politics and their ability to build themselves into images of great men is truly both inspiring, and from an ethical point of view, slightly terrifying.

The fact that intelligent, experienced and incredibly friendly voters can be so easily swayed by a boy playing strong and yelling on stage holds an unfortunate lens over our real-life system and provides a deep insight into the way politics is run in our society.