Election day is finally here.

Time for a presidential coin flip.

Better yet, roll some dice to determine your vote.

There are so many high-profile third-party presidential candidates this year that a die roll would be more appropriate.

Assign each candidate a number and let the dice fly.

Allow chance to make your selection. After all, it’s almost impossible to make an informed selection based on what they’ve all said during the campaign, which amounts to just slightly more than nothing.

Scratch that. Making your choice by random chance is too extreme.

Make a choice — an informed choice — when you fill in your bubble sheet tomorrow.

Don’t vote for one party because you always have or your family always has. Lookat the facts in front of you.

If you haven’t learned anything — really learned anything — about the candidates you favor, then cram in a hurry.

You may find that your choices are not what you hoped for. And make sure that you study the candidates more closely in future elections.

You won’t learn much about a political candidate from what he or she says in a campaign.

Obviously, campaigns are designed to do one thing: cull as many votes as possible. So why trust or believe anything said during one?

Looking at the past is a better way of finding out what a candidate is all about. For career politicians, this is easy.

Their actions while in office are very public and will be readily available from major media sources.

Check out a bit of Clinton’s record. What exactly is his position on individual freedom, especially as it relates to the Internet? His administration moved to implement the National Security Agency’s Clipper Chip plan, which would have placed an encoding chip in every piece of telecommunications hardware, from phones to fax modems.

This would secure data transmissions with a common encoding standard but would allow the government to decode and monitor them.

Is that an action by someone who truly supports the Land of the Free?

Dole is the candidate of the corporations. As a senator, he consistently favored legislation which gives special consideration to big business.

This may not look like such a bad thing; any good capitalist would favor giving business an edge.

But Dole has made a career and gained much support by supporting bills to allow corporations more leeway to operate without government regulation.

He was in the vanguard of lawmakers who are dismantling OSHA regulations, which make more work for companies but which protect workers from hazardous working conditions.

Doing so is good for Dole, because supporting such legislation equals big campaign donations from corporate policial action committees (PACs).

And when the bill comes due for such support, who will Dole support — the corporation or the average citizen? Take a look at the ad which ran last week in major newspapers where Silicon Valley executives endorsed the Dole-Kemp ticket to see where Dole’s support really lies.

For candidates running for the first time, background research can be a bit more difficult. But anyone running for office is bound to have some public life; no one with any significant backing will be a total unknown. He or she will have something of note and publicly available in his or her background.

Look at Ross Perot, a very high-profile private citizen.

He has been known to hire private investigators to check on his employees and ensure their moral probity; after all, trouble at home could mean trouble at work. And when some of his EDS executives were taken hostage in Iran in 1979, he hired former special forces Colonel Bull Simons to train a team and get his people out.

Does this make Perot a budding J. Edgar Hoover, compiling files on everyone to ensure security for the nation?

And does it make him a dangerous player in foreign policy and covert operations?

It’s a tough call.

So, Clinton definitely favors large, even intrusive government. Dole is firmly entrenched on the side of moneyed interests.

And Perot is a bit paranoid and something of a cowboy.

Make an informed choice tomorrow. Don’t vote on the basis of campaign image or family tradition.

And if you aren’t voting, get yourself registered for the next election.

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Kevin Kirby is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Louisville. H has a B.A. in political science from the University of Wyoming.