Your Vote Goes to College

This ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ clip — first aired 14 years ago — will tell you exactly how the United States works.

America’s future nightmare gazes, baffled, at symbols of the process he may yet destroy.

Today, a sizable portion of the multivarious persons that comprise the vaunted American People will walk down a street, enter a polling place, and pull a lever (lol jk, it’s all scanned fill-in-the-bubble forms now) that might possibly decide the fate of what George Washington called the Great Experiment. Joining in with the chorus of clunking (i.e., scanning) machines will be the folks that make up the Electoral College, or, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, “a body of people representing the states of the U.S., who formally cast votes for the election of the president and vice president.” The Electoral College is confusing, so let Schoolhouse Rock clue you in:

Normally I’d add something edifying or clever to this, but like you, I’m spending the bulk of my day vacillating between collapsing in exhaustion and running in anxious circles. Take from this video what you will, America. I’m hunting for a bunker. You’re on your own.

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