Instead of being barraged by which candidate is in its best interest to vote for, lately the American public has, instead, just simply been told to vote.

MTV sports clips from today’s popular-music personalities advised viewers to get out and vote on election day.

Television audiences were presented Saturday with a two-hour “All-Star Celebration: The ‘88 Vote,” in which a host of celebrities from Whoopie Goldberg to Cheap Trick sang, danced, joked and often preached about the importance and necessity for Americans to get out to the polls on election day and vote.

The push to increase public awareness of the importance to vote even has gone as far as a public simulation of a mock police state in Jefferson, Ohio. Students wanting to give citizens the idea of what it might be like to live in a police state and wanting to remind citizens to vote, have erected a cinder-block, “Berlin Wall” check point limiting traffic on one of the city’s streets to one lane. Some citizens feel this is an inconvenience and have begun to complain.

Unfortunately, it is most likely that those citizens complaining are the very ones to whom the message is directed—the section of the public considering the upcoming election to be a bunch of media hype and voting to be a waste of time.

There is truth to the saying that every vote makes a difference, so such a reminder to vote only should be a start—the public should become more aware of just who it is voting for as well.