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> does not solve the voter turnout problem Refusing to vote is a perfectly valid choice in a democracy. Politicians like to pretend that the 40-60% of the peo

> does not solve the voter turnout problem Refusing to vote is a perfectly valid choice in a democracy. Politicians like to pretend that the 40-60% of the people who don't vote are not voting because they are stupid, ill-informed, or whatever, but the much more likely explanation is that this group recognizing (rightly) that voting is a waste of time in a political system as corrupt as the U.S. or the refuse to vote as a form of conscientious objection. In reality the winner of every election in decades has been "none of the above."

andrewla 9y ago
I agree to a very large extent; I was just commenting on a response to an article about increasing voter turnout. The suggested approach (mail-in-only voting), while nice in many ways, does not (empirically) have that particular effect. I think voter turnout has become the axis on which all modern (presidential) elections have hinged. Trump didn't beat Hillary in the rust belt by convincing hoards of Obama supporters to bot Republican. What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home. The numbers bear this out (although we don't have individual tallies) -- Trump didn't win any more votes in those states than Romney did in the last election. The same voters who pulled that lever came out and did the same thing they did in the last cycle. That's also why the polls were so off -- they rely on "likely voter" models, not realizing that what they should be measuring is not who likely voters will vote for, but whether or not people will show up at the polls. Instead, they used "likely voter" criteria that they learned in the Obama election and gauged sentiment in that group.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home The group of Obama voters that declined to vote for Clinton was definitely large enough to lose her the election. That sort of reinforces my point about role of refusing to vote in a democracy. The political power of those protest non-voters far exceeded the power of anyone who voted.

andrewla 9y ago

I agree to a very large extent; I was just commenting on a response to an article about increasing voter turnout. The suggested approach (mail-in-only voting), while nice in many ways, does not (empirically) have that particular effect. I think voter turnout has become the axis on which all modern (presidential) elections have hinged. Trump didn't beat Hillary in the rust belt by convincing hoards of Obama supporters to bot Republican. What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home. The numbers bear this out (although we don't have individual tallies) -- Trump didn't win any more votes in those states than Romney did in the last election. The same voters who pulled that lever came out and did the same thing they did in the last cycle. That's also why the polls were so off -- they rely on "likely voter" models, not realizing that what they should be measuring is not who likely voters will vote for, but whether or not people will show up at the polls. Instead, they used "likely voter" criteria that they learned in the Obama election and gauged sentiment in that group.

saas_co_de 9y ago
> What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home The group of Obama voters that declined to vote for Clinton was definitely large enough to lose her the election. That sort of reinforces my point about role of refusing to vote in a democracy. The political power of those protest non-voters far exceeded the power of anyone who voted.