Politics and election coverage

Its currently election season at its peak in the USofA. Which means no matter what channel you turn to, you get bombarded with local and national ads as to which candidate is suitable (mostly which one is unsuitable) to govern you and your family and friends. I have nothing against that, tis the season to be campaigning. This piece is about the viewers of said programs.
We have cable at home, which means we can watch the same ad on a 100 different channels, as well as dish tv, which means we can figure out whats happening in India too on the political scene. Among this vast array of choices, at any given time, there are dozens of channels NOT playing political ads or (more annoying to me) political discussions about these ads and the candidates. Programs that follow said candidates through every piece of dialogue, every speech and every interview, and believe you me, they do a lot of all of these.
With all the choices we have to watch something other than politics, guess what we end up watching every single day for hours at a time? Yepp, election coverage! For some reason, the average middle-class indian feels an almost impossible-to-deny urge to be informed of the political process of the country they reside in. I say this admiringly, cause there is nothing better than being informed of the situation around you. However, the level of information we need and the amount of information gathering that takes place is completely disproportional. For eg., for me, knowing which candidates are vying for which post and what their basic beliefs are is enough information. Takes one half-hour to an hour each day, if that. So why do we watch TV coverage of these candidates for 3-4 hours everyday? There's no new information coming in, usually the same speeches are recycled, and the polls change constantly as to which states will vote for which candidates or which county will vote which way. My motto is wait for the final results, cause everything else is just conjecture. but apparently, there are millions of people out there who spend tons of time talking about, discussing, arguing and impossibly enough, watching this conjecturing (sic?). It totally baffles me. I'm just glad election is tomorrow, so we finally get to put the guesswork to rest. But then, there's the post-election coverage and the wisdom of hindsight that gets doled out by the same channels in abundance. So we're looking forward to another couple of months or so of TV watching, discussions, arguments and political information being bandied about in the family room.
And why am I being a bad citizen by not following the election coverage 24 hours a day? Precisely because I'm not... a citizen, that is. All this political coverage is being followed in a household with three adults and a baby, none of whom are eligible to vote. I dread to think of the time when we will be, and the amount of TV watching that will be awaiting us before we feel ready to cast our all-important vote.