I was involved in marking a standardized test for high school students and one question involved inventing a story on an (unspecified) election. What shocked me the most, aside from the poor writing ability, the unintentionally unbelievable facts of the stories, and the surprising amount of confusion and internal contradiction within the students' responses, was that although remarkably few students demonstrated much awareness of politics or the political process, despite having taken a mandatory course on this subject, nearly all of the students regarded voting as a mystical or near-spiritual experience of civic involvement, social communion, and individual empowerment.

Some students were probably 'sucking up'. But nearly every student?