The Amber Alert system and voter participation in elections

Speech

Informative

In 1996, 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted while riding her bicycle in Arlington Texas. She was never seen alive again. One local women Diana Simone, thought that since there were alerts for things like storms, it would be possible to have a system of public alerts for missing children. Such a system, she surmised, might be able to save lives, if the entire community was mobilized from an early stage in the search. The Amber Alert system was developed on the basis of this idea.

The program works in that when a child is reported missing, the child's details are not just relayed to law enforcement, but are broadcast via various means to the public. The program proved to be successful, and now it operates in 20 countries around the world, and uses a multitude of technology in order to spread reports about missing children in the hopes that people can see something, or remember something, and hopefully save a life.

Smartphones and social media are on the ways in which the Amber Alerts are broadcast. SMS has been used for years, and the Wireless Emergency Alerts program has been activated to ensure that smartphone users who opt in can receive these alerts. This system builds Amber Alerts into a system with "Imminent Threat" Alerts and Presidential Alerts.

There are specific guidelines for sending out an Amber Alert. First, law enforcement must confirm that there has been an abduction. Whether this is by a stranger or a parent does not matter -- both can qualify as an Amber Alert situation. Then, law enforcement has to assess whether or not there is a risk to the child. If there is risk of serious injury or death, then the case may be eligible for the system. There also must be sufficient descriptive information in the alert. Without this, everybody might look suspicious, so there has to be some level of detail where the police feel that the public's help on the matter would improve their odds of finding the child safe.

The Amber Alert system is only applicable for children. Adults are not eligible. Seniors have their own system, the Silver Alert, and this is not usually for cases of abduction. With these criteria met, an Amber Alert can be issued to help get the child back alive (Amber Alert.gov, 2016)

Persuasive

This fall, Americans will once again go the polls to vote in the federal elections. Yet, many young people will not.. Historically, we are a poor voting country -- just 57.5% of eligible voters turned out in 2012 according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. This rate is simply too low, given what is at stake, and young people are very much part of the problem. Whatever the excuse is, whatever the beef, just go out and vote. Do your homework, know the issues and the candidates and vote.

There are many people who feel that if their candidate does not win the primary, that they might not vote. While this view is understandable -- there can be significant policy differences between candidates, the reality is that your job as a citizen is to vote for the best available candidate. If that candidate ends up not being the nominee, there are still candidates on the ballot. One of them will be better than the others. It may seem distasteful to vote for a candidate on the basis of being "least awful," if you see it that way, but this is still something that should be done. What happens when you do not vote is that you surrender the little political power that you have, but more than that you surrender it to whoever does decide to vote, and they might have even worse ideas than you do.