Or the illuminati symbols . Those are fun to find . <| sep |> A country is made up of individuals . If everyone makes it about themselves then the person who gets the office should were it not for the electoral college represent the desires of the majority of people . If you have the Hutus and Tutsis in an election voting for themselves , you ' re gonna have a bad time . That ' s what happens in sectarian countries , when everyone votes for someone who looks like them and favours them . Not exactly the same as abstaining , but you get my point that just voting for your own interests is not necessarily going to get you the best system , and at worst it ' s a way of explicitly hurting other people . That aside , your assuming that a candidate is beholden to any promises they make when they are running and that they won ' t just act in there own self interest . Very rarely do we actually manage to elect a real civil servant , and even more rare are they able to actually make the changes they would like . We ' re talking about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump here . Clinton is not exactly an unknown quantity it ' s not like you ' ll elect her and she ' ll suddenly be a neoNazi . We can see her voting record , see what she did as SoS and First Lady , see what Dems have done for the last 8 years , and have a pretty solid estimate of what she ' s going to prioritize not accomplish necessarily , since that ' s up to Congress . And then there ' s Trump . Well . He seemed like an idiot who didn ' t know what he was talking about and didn ' t care about norms or decency of any kind , and in the couple weeks since he ' s been elected he ' s shaping up to be exactly that kind of president . Basically , pretending that the campaigning politician does not at all reflect the politician ' s administration is certainly not a real excuse in this particular election , if it ever is .