Voting Launch Activity

Objectives 

• Students will explore the inconveniences of direct democracy through multiple rounds of low stakes voting and compare their experience to that of voting representatives. 
• Students will describe how delegating power to representatives allows them to represent the will of the people.  
• Students will describe problems that can arise in a direct democracy. 

• Constitutional Principles: Representative Government video 

Lesson Overview 

• In this lesson, you and your students will vote multiple times on low-stakes decisions to experience the burden of direct democracy and why the Founders chose to form a representative democracy instead. Students will then vote in the style of a republic in order to experience the difference between democratic and representative government. Finally, students create a product of their choice to depict how the United States would function if it were a direct democracy.