The United States was founded on a democratic government that Abraham Lincoln described as "of people by the people for the people." The MTV Video Music Awards was founded upon similar values, since it's up to the people to choose which music videos and musicians are the best of the year. If you're itching to exercise your democratic rights, then you need to know when the 2017 VMAs voting closes, obviously.
Sadly, voting for most 2017 MTV VMAs categories closed on August 17, but it's not too late to exercise your democratic duties. After all, you can still vote for the VMAs' Best New Artist until August 27. Additionally, you'll have the chance to vote for the VMAs' Song of the Summer this Thursday, August 24, on Snapchat. Voting will begin at 1 p.m. ET, on MTV's Snapchat Story, and it will run for 36 hours. If just voting on MTV.com for Best New Artist is just too old school for you though, there's an alternative: fans can vote using a Twitter bot that slides into your DMs until Sunday, August 27 before the show.
While the options for how you can vote for Best New Artist and Song of the Summer are plentiful, it's surprising that more voting categories haven't stayed open to the public for longer. It seems that MTV wants to make sure they have plenty of time to tally the votes in order to announce the correct winners at Sunday's show. Considering what happened at this year's Oscars, it's probably a good thing that MTV is so organized. However, if Kanye is at this year's VMAs, he still might announce that the wrong winner got the prize.
There's really no telling what will happen during Sunday's show, but hopefully there will be a lot of meaningful messages considering today's polarized political climate. It looks like there might be, too, because MTV added new progressive rules like non-gendered categories. They also added a Best Fight Against The System category, which includes "Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)" from The Hamilton Mixtape and a #NoDAPL video.
It's nice to see the VMAs lending a spotlight to the social justice issues the U.S. is facing today, and it will surely be interesting to see how the artists use the stage to spread their political messages.
