8 ms·

There seems to be an assumption that low voter turnout is driven by something other than the poor quality of the candidates offered and a rational assessment of

by JackFr 8y ago

There seems to be an assumption that low voter turnout is driven by something other than the poor quality of the candidates offered and a rational assessment of the value of voter time versus the marginal value of a single vote. It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance.

splintercell 8y ago
> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. And that has never been the intent. High voter turnout leads to Democratic victories and rain on the election day leads to Republican ones. If someone is building an app to create technology to make it rain on the election day for whatever reason, you can probably guess the real reason behind it.
drb91 8y ago
> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. Higher than what? Anyway, I think you’re projecting a lot of rationality where there’s just apathy. In any case, low voter turnout tends to harm the democrats, as demonstrated by the ludicrous variety of ways various state republican parties have made voting difficult for working people, poor people, non-english speakers, felons, etc etc.
- mc32 8y ago
  A few authoritarian regimes have been known have high voter turnout. Russia recently had 67% turnout, Cuba 90%, Turkey had 85% though turkey is compulsory. So, turnout is kind of an independent index. Also, statistically speaking, if the turnout is “representative” then high or low makes no difference with regard to what would occur with full turnout. When people say we want high turnout, I think they really mean I want my side to have full turnout and the opposition very low turnout —as this is the only situation where this quest makes sense.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Yes, turnout by itself is not a good index. But that seems like a strawman.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - tinbad 8y ago
    I don’t know about the others but in Russia, most employers will make you go and vote. Sometimes for a small reward, go vote for the “preferred” candidate and get $100. Which is significant for someone living off a median wage.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  Let's flip a coin: heads I win, tails you lose. If you decide not to play, are you being more rational or more apathetic?
- cheeseomlit 8y ago
  -
  - mariojv 8y ago
    I know many non-English speaking or limited English speaking citizens. Why wouldn't you want them voting?
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      Side comment: We had a situation here where there was a candidate for a judge, whose name was Uno. (He was ethnically Japanese.) Well, in one of the counties where his name was on the ballot, Hispanics were more than 5% of the population. The election rules required that, for such counties, the ballot instructions be written in Spanish as well as in English. For the judgeship in question, voters were to vote for only one candidate. The translation of that instruction into Spanish was "Vota para uno"! Note well: I am not saying that citizens who don't speak English shouldn't vote.
  - ilikehurdles 8y ago
    Give out free IDs, streamline the ID process, and I won't care about ID requirements. Where I live, while there are DMVs in the city, the only DMVs that provide IDs and licenses are in the suburbs, many of which close at 4:30 PM. Requiring a person to pay for an ID and hope to qualify for a reimbursement later is just two steps removed from a poll tax. Yes of course I want felons to vote (especially if they've served their sentence), and non-english speakers as well. A citizen is a citizen.
- mindslight 8y ago
  > Anyway, I think you’re projecting a lot of rationality where there’s just apathy. Calling it "just apathy" is unjustifiable maligning. How is it not completely rational to be apathetic to whether business interests A or business interests B win their contest? What you're doing is the equivalent of a sports fanatic insisting that someone pick a team to root for. Give these "apathetic" people an actual choice (like say a pitchfork) and you'll see how they really feel. In fact, I'd posit that a primary mechanism by which elections are won is convincing people that "this time will be different".
  - skybrian 8y ago
    This boils down to an argument that none of the issues that divide the parties matter to you. Apparently you don't care about immigration, feminism, LGBT issues, inequality and so on? Trump is boring? American politics in 2018 is not lacking in drama or stark divisions. If today's politics doesn't excite you, what could possibly do it?
    - justtopost 8y ago
      The divisions are both extreme and bad. I don't want Nationalist isolationism anymore than I want unrelenting psudeo-socalist globalists who are Both clearly in the pocket of big business. No, the issues of social identity are not the real issues facing our country in my humble opinion.
    - JackFr 8y ago
      Well, under our two party system you end up with two shopping carts full of positions, and you've got to buy one of them. Now neither shopping cart typically lines up perfectly with a hypothetical voter, but what do you do if both baskets contain things that you feel deeply about and oppose? For instance where should a voter who cares deeply about abortion and capital punishment to go? The Democrats are not simply pro-choice, they demean and belittle his pro-life position. The Republicans find it inconceivable that he doesn't want to execute people guilty of the most heinous crimes, and he's dismissed as an unserious bleeding-heart. So maybe it's not that he's unexcited by the issues, but rather because of his strong inclinations he has no one to vote for. It might be that low turnout is evidence that the current 'baskets' of the two parties are poorly aligned with the current electorate.
vatsion 8y ago
The problem isn't necessarily low voter turnout overall, but the differences across groups. For example (these numbers are off the top of my head, but in the right ballpark) when middle class people vote at a 70% rate and the working poor vote at 40%, you don't get representation that reflects the communities it represents, regardless of candidate quality. Neither the cost of voter time, as you referenced, nor its value is the same across groups. You'll find that efforts to increase voter turnout are emphasized in those communities where turnout is low.
jrs95 8y ago
We used to have a limit in place where each representative in Congress had no more than 40,000 constituents. This allowed a single individual to have a meaningful influence if they wanted to and kept people engaged. Now elections are so large that there's almost nothing you can do as an individual to make a substantial difference without having vast sums of money.
- Balgair 8y ago
  I also agree that a much larger congress would be a better thing. Returning to less large rep districts would be more representative. Granted, the House would become geometrically more chaotic (handshaking problem), but I think a better system would emerge. That said, I don't think you are correct, at all, when you say that money is the only thing that matters. Votes matter. For example: The Nov 2012 Los Angeles elections. I voted in those elections. Mayor Garcetti won the election with only 5.4% of the city voting for him [0]. That means that I voted for ~20 Los Angelenos with my single ballot. Basically, I voted for half my homeroom in High School. You cannot buy votes nor stuff ballot boxes at the exchange rate I was able to affect with my single vote. And this was a presidential election, where turnout is typically higher. For the majority of local elections, I was voting for nearly my entire graduating class! Another good example was Eric Cantor's primary election in 2014 [1]. Despite being the House Majority Leader, and despite outspending his opponent not just 2 to 1, not just 10 to 1, but 40 to 1, Cantor LOST. And it wasn't close, he lost 45% to 55%, a 10 point difference. Cantor resigned as Majority Leader on July 31st. Money does not count. Your. Vote. Counts. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_mayoral_election,_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_mayoral_election,_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Virginia,_2014#District_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Represe...
  - jrs95 8y ago
    I didn't make it clear what I meant about money. The issue now is that each district is so large that in order to have an influence beyond your own vote you need a lot of money. You can't just talk to people in your community and have a noticeable impact on the outcome. If this were the case, the public would have a lot more influence over government. As it currently stands, one form of mass manipulation or another greatly outweighs what individual activism can achieve.
fullshark 8y ago
> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. The assumption is based on the fact that young people have low turnout, and these turnout initiatives are almost universally about getting young people who lean/are left to go vote. Most "get out the vote" drives are not really about improving our democracy and are actually about supporting Democrat politicians and their policies, which is why they target specific demographics that are likely to vote the "right way" (Samantha Bee's audience being a blatant example here of people that would vote for Democrats).
- specialist 8y ago
  The phrase is "mobilize your base". Both Republicans and Democrats have GOTV strategies. Republican efforts have faltered of late, because they have trouble recruiting / enlisting volunteers, comparatively. You can see this in how campaign spend their money. Advertising vs doorbelling. It now occurs to me that age may be a factor in campaign staffing. Whereas 10 years ago, Democrat rank & file were blue hairs. Think Vietnam war protestors, old school labor, academics. Now the party is much younger. It's been a long time since I've been to Republican party events, so just from what I've read, their party rank & file hasn't seen that kind of turnover.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Both Republicans and Democrats have GOTV strategies. Republican efforts have faltered of late, because they have trouble recruiting / enlisting volunteers, comparatively. Republican GOTV efforts have arguably reached their limits, because their base is effectively fully mobilized; Republican leaning voters are much more reliable voters than Democrats, and much more effectively politically organized (even when not overtly through party/electoral organizations; often through highly politicized religious/organizations, including churches that overtly flour, without consequence, the prohibitions on electoral activities that are attached to church 501(c)3 status.) OTOH, very recently there are simply fewer Republicans, as there's been an exodus from identifying as a Republican or Republican-leaning independent over the last couple years. The people outside the committee base that a GOTV effort might seek to draw in—always a smaller share on the Republican side—are increasingly just not there at all on that side. Of course, the flip side of this is Republican active voter suppression strategies targeting Democratic-leaning constituencies, which continue to escalate (including strategies executed through state policy, especially since the elimination of key parts of the Voting Rights Act.) > It now occurs to me that age may be a factor in campaign staffing. Absolutely. > Whereas 10 years ago, Democrat rank & file were blue hairs. Think Vietnam war protestors, old school labor, academics. Now the party is much younger. I think the first part is significantly exaggerated, but it's true that as more Millennials (where Democrats have a huge edge that's remained roughly constant since adult Millennials were around to poll) have come of age but Boomers shifted from a big Democratic advantage (that only existed during the second half of the George W. Bush administration) back to a competitive demographic—I’m not ignoring GenX, its just been a pretty constant slight Democratic lean and already fully into the eligible-to-vote age range, so it has neither the coming-of-age nor shifting-preferences effects of the surrounding generations—the Democratic Party has gotten younger faster than the Republicans (whose only solid lead, by generation, is with the Silent Generation.) Source: http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/party-identification-trends-1992-2017/ http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/party-identification-...
specialist 8y ago
*"...not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance." That's the thesis of the book Democracy for Realists. http://a.co/d/hg6wfUy http://a.co/d/hg6wfUy TL;DR: People vote based on identity. It's a painful, illuminating read. -- The only consistent way to boost turnout is competitive races. While I'm for universal, automatic voter registration (mostly for election integrity reasons), I acknowledge that it's just nibbling around the edges. Big, sustainable increases in participation would come from switching to approval voting (or proportional representation, as appropriate) coupled with fair redistricting. Pretty much any measure to improve competitiveness will boost turnout.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
srpablo 8y ago
Apathy may be a huge part of it, but that doesn't negate the very real policies that are put in place to prevent people from voting: - Extremely long poll lines, especially in underserved areas or those mostly populated by racial/ethnic minorities. - Making people vote on a work day without federal holiday means that it's a financial obstacle, and employment risk. Again, this mostly hits the poor and underserved. - No paper trail, and extremely hackable voter machines, not enough movement to fix them. [1] - Voting Rights Act rollback: it was almost impossible to vote if you were Black in racist-run parts of the south (really, look at this [6]), and the protection against this got rolled back in 2013. There's been a bunch of voting law changes since [8]. - ID requirements that have been researched thoroughly and demonstrated to do almost nothing to reduce fraud but virtually always lower turnout, usually to minority populations. [7] Aside from the topic of voter turnout itself, there are many other ways the democratic ideal is attacked by policy, such as gerrymandering[2], or the fact that we often refer to political parties as "half the country" when in reality only ~26% of the electorate voted for the current president[3], it was a single-digit percentage that voted for each of the eventual candidates in the primaries[4], and even "the electorate" is a lot smaller than our adult working population because felons aren't allowed to vote and we imprison more adults (mostly from poor and underserved populations) than any other industrialized nation. [5] All this to say, yes, there's a lot of understandable apathy in our system, and we shouldn't judge their lack of desire to vote as some kind of moral failing. But there are many people who would love to participate in a democratic process but there are many concrete (and solvable) factors (with evidence and history beyond "an assumption") preventing participation, and the end result almost always favors a small group of people who don't represent the general population and already have a lot of power. [1]: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/elle-vargas-primary-directive-on-elections-interference [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/01/this-is-the-best-explanation-of-gerrymandering-you-will-ever-see/?utm_term=.58b2297c703c [3]: https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-2016/index.html [4]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/01/us/elections/nine-percent-of-america-selected-trump-and-clinton.html [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate [6]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html [7]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/04/new-evidence-that-voter-id-laws-skew-democracy-in-favor-of-white-republicans/?utm_term=.5ddefa4ccf27 [8]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/welcome-to-the-first-presidential-election-since-voting-rights-act-gutted-179737/
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
I could even argue that lower turnout leads to better governance. If you don't care enough to pay attention, if you don't care enough to investigate the candidates, then I'd prefer that you also don't care enough to go vote. If you do go vote, you (you the hypothetical uninformed voter, not you, my reader) are going to vote for the candidate that had the most ads. I don't want elections being decided by voters who are making decisions that way.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Thank you for saying that. I have only managed to vote twice in my life, in part because I don't want to pick a name at random and have been rather overwhelmed by events, yet I have had people give me a hard time about that, like it's my fault if bad candidates got elected because I didn't bother to pick a name at random. And it always infuriates me to be told that I should vote anyway, even if it is random name picking.

by JackFr 8y ago

splintercell 8y ago

> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. And that has never been the intent. High voter turnout leads to Democratic victories and rain on the election day leads to Republican ones. If someone is building an app to create technology to make it rain on the election day for whatever reason, you can probably guess the real reason behind it.

drb91 8y ago

> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. Higher than what? Anyway, I think you’re projecting a lot of rationality where there’s just apathy. In any case, low voter turnout tends to harm the democrats, as demonstrated by the ludicrous variety of ways various state republican parties have made voting difficult for working people, poor people, non-english speakers, felons, etc etc.

mc32 8y ago
A few authoritarian regimes have been known have high voter turnout. Russia recently had 67% turnout, Cuba 90%, Turkey had 85% though turkey is compulsory. So, turnout is kind of an independent index. Also, statistically speaking, if the turnout is “representative” then high or low makes no difference with regard to what would occur with full turnout. When people say we want high turnout, I think they really mean I want my side to have full turnout and the opposition very low turnout —as this is the only situation where this quest makes sense.
- drb91 8y ago
  Yes, turnout by itself is not a good index. But that seems like a strawman.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- tinbad 8y ago
  I don’t know about the others but in Russia, most employers will make you go and vote. Sometimes for a small reward, go vote for the “preferred” candidate and get $100. Which is significant for someone living off a median wage.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
Let's flip a coin: heads I win, tails you lose. If you decide not to play, are you being more rational or more apathetic?
cheeseomlit 8y ago
-
- mariojv 8y ago
  I know many non-English speaking or limited English speaking citizens. Why wouldn't you want them voting?
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Side comment: We had a situation here where there was a candidate for a judge, whose name was Uno. (He was ethnically Japanese.) Well, in one of the counties where his name was on the ballot, Hispanics were more than 5% of the population. The election rules required that, for such counties, the ballot instructions be written in Spanish as well as in English. For the judgeship in question, voters were to vote for only one candidate. The translation of that instruction into Spanish was "Vota para uno"! Note well: I am not saying that citizens who don't speak English shouldn't vote.
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  Give out free IDs, streamline the ID process, and I won't care about ID requirements. Where I live, while there are DMVs in the city, the only DMVs that provide IDs and licenses are in the suburbs, many of which close at 4:30 PM. Requiring a person to pay for an ID and hope to qualify for a reimbursement later is just two steps removed from a poll tax. Yes of course I want felons to vote (especially if they've served their sentence), and non-english speakers as well. A citizen is a citizen.
mindslight 8y ago
> Anyway, I think you’re projecting a lot of rationality where there’s just apathy. Calling it "just apathy" is unjustifiable maligning. How is it not completely rational to be apathetic to whether business interests A or business interests B win their contest? What you're doing is the equivalent of a sports fanatic insisting that someone pick a team to root for. Give these "apathetic" people an actual choice (like say a pitchfork) and you'll see how they really feel. In fact, I'd posit that a primary mechanism by which elections are won is convincing people that "this time will be different".
- skybrian 8y ago
  This boils down to an argument that none of the issues that divide the parties matter to you. Apparently you don't care about immigration, feminism, LGBT issues, inequality and so on? Trump is boring? American politics in 2018 is not lacking in drama or stark divisions. If today's politics doesn't excite you, what could possibly do it?
  - justtopost 8y ago
    The divisions are both extreme and bad. I don't want Nationalist isolationism anymore than I want unrelenting psudeo-socalist globalists who are Both clearly in the pocket of big business. No, the issues of social identity are not the real issues facing our country in my humble opinion.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    Well, under our two party system you end up with two shopping carts full of positions, and you've got to buy one of them. Now neither shopping cart typically lines up perfectly with a hypothetical voter, but what do you do if both baskets contain things that you feel deeply about and oppose? For instance where should a voter who cares deeply about abortion and capital punishment to go? The Democrats are not simply pro-choice, they demean and belittle his pro-life position. The Republicans find it inconceivable that he doesn't want to execute people guilty of the most heinous crimes, and he's dismissed as an unserious bleeding-heart. So maybe it's not that he's unexcited by the issues, but rather because of his strong inclinations he has no one to vote for. It might be that low turnout is evidence that the current 'baskets' of the two parties are poorly aligned with the current electorate.

vatsion 8y ago

The problem isn't necessarily low voter turnout overall, but the differences across groups. For example (these numbers are off the top of my head, but in the right ballpark) when middle class people vote at a 70% rate and the working poor vote at 40%, you don't get representation that reflects the communities it represents, regardless of candidate quality. Neither the cost of voter time, as you referenced, nor its value is the same across groups. You'll find that efforts to increase voter turnout are emphasized in those communities where turnout is low.

jrs95 8y ago

We used to have a limit in place where each representative in Congress had no more than 40,000 constituents. This allowed a single individual to have a meaningful influence if they wanted to and kept people engaged. Now elections are so large that there's almost nothing you can do as an individual to make a substantial difference without having vast sums of money.

Balgair 8y ago
I also agree that a much larger congress would be a better thing. Returning to less large rep districts would be more representative. Granted, the House would become geometrically more chaotic (handshaking problem), but I think a better system would emerge. That said, I don't think you are correct, at all, when you say that money is the only thing that matters. Votes matter. For example: The Nov 2012 Los Angeles elections. I voted in those elections. Mayor Garcetti won the election with only 5.4% of the city voting for him [0]. That means that I voted for ~20 Los Angelenos with my single ballot. Basically, I voted for half my homeroom in High School. You cannot buy votes nor stuff ballot boxes at the exchange rate I was able to affect with my single vote. And this was a presidential election, where turnout is typically higher. For the majority of local elections, I was voting for nearly my entire graduating class! Another good example was Eric Cantor's primary election in 2014 [1]. Despite being the House Majority Leader, and despite outspending his opponent not just 2 to 1, not just 10 to 1, but 40 to 1, Cantor LOST. And it wasn't close, he lost 45% to 55%, a 10 point difference. Cantor resigned as Majority Leader on July 31st. Money does not count. Your. Vote. Counts. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_mayoral_election,_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_mayoral_election,_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Virginia,_2014#District_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Represe...
- jrs95 8y ago
  I didn't make it clear what I meant about money. The issue now is that each district is so large that in order to have an influence beyond your own vote you need a lot of money. You can't just talk to people in your community and have a noticeable impact on the outcome. If this were the case, the public would have a lot more influence over government. As it currently stands, one form of mass manipulation or another greatly outweighs what individual activism can achieve.

fullshark 8y ago

> It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance. The assumption is based on the fact that young people have low turnout, and these turnout initiatives are almost universally about getting young people who lean/are left to go vote. Most "get out the vote" drives are not really about improving our democracy and are actually about supporting Democrat politicians and their policies, which is why they target specific demographics that are likely to vote the "right way" (Samantha Bee's audience being a blatant example here of people that would vote for Democrats).

specialist 8y ago
The phrase is "mobilize your base". Both Republicans and Democrats have GOTV strategies. Republican efforts have faltered of late, because they have trouble recruiting / enlisting volunteers, comparatively. You can see this in how campaign spend their money. Advertising vs doorbelling. It now occurs to me that age may be a factor in campaign staffing. Whereas 10 years ago, Democrat rank & file were blue hairs. Think Vietnam war protestors, old school labor, academics. Now the party is much younger. It's been a long time since I've been to Republican party events, so just from what I've read, their party rank & file hasn't seen that kind of turnover.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Both Republicans and Democrats have GOTV strategies. Republican efforts have faltered of late, because they have trouble recruiting / enlisting volunteers, comparatively. Republican GOTV efforts have arguably reached their limits, because their base is effectively fully mobilized; Republican leaning voters are much more reliable voters than Democrats, and much more effectively politically organized (even when not overtly through party/electoral organizations; often through highly politicized religious/organizations, including churches that overtly flour, without consequence, the prohibitions on electoral activities that are attached to church 501(c)3 status.) OTOH, very recently there are simply fewer Republicans, as there's been an exodus from identifying as a Republican or Republican-leaning independent over the last couple years. The people outside the committee base that a GOTV effort might seek to draw in—always a smaller share on the Republican side—are increasingly just not there at all on that side. Of course, the flip side of this is Republican active voter suppression strategies targeting Democratic-leaning constituencies, which continue to escalate (including strategies executed through state policy, especially since the elimination of key parts of the Voting Rights Act.) > It now occurs to me that age may be a factor in campaign staffing. Absolutely. > Whereas 10 years ago, Democrat rank & file were blue hairs. Think Vietnam war protestors, old school labor, academics. Now the party is much younger. I think the first part is significantly exaggerated, but it's true that as more Millennials (where Democrats have a huge edge that's remained roughly constant since adult Millennials were around to poll) have come of age but Boomers shifted from a big Democratic advantage (that only existed during the second half of the George W. Bush administration) back to a competitive demographic—I’m not ignoring GenX, its just been a pretty constant slight Democratic lean and already fully into the eligible-to-vote age range, so it has neither the coming-of-age nor shifting-preferences effects of the surrounding generations—the Democratic Party has gotten younger faster than the Republicans (whose only solid lead, by generation, is with the Silent Generation.) Source: http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/party-identification-trends-1992-2017/ http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/party-identification-...

specialist 8y ago

*"...not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance." That's the thesis of the book Democracy for Realists. http://a.co/d/hg6wfUy http://a.co/d/hg6wfUy TL;DR: People vote based on identity. It's a painful, illuminating read. -- The only consistent way to boost turnout is competitive races. While I'm for universal, automatic voter registration (mostly for election integrity reasons), I acknowledge that it's just nibbling around the edges. Big, sustainable increases in participation would come from switching to approval voting (or proportional representation, as appropriate) coupled with fair redistricting. Pretty much any measure to improve competitiveness will boost turnout.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

srpablo 8y ago

Apathy may be a huge part of it, but that doesn't negate the very real policies that are put in place to prevent people from voting: - Extremely long poll lines, especially in underserved areas or those mostly populated by racial/ethnic minorities. - Making people vote on a work day without federal holiday means that it's a financial obstacle, and employment risk. Again, this mostly hits the poor and underserved. - No paper trail, and extremely hackable voter machines, not enough movement to fix them. [1] - Voting Rights Act rollback: it was almost impossible to vote if you were Black in racist-run parts of the south (really, look at this [6]), and the protection against this got rolled back in 2013. There's been a bunch of voting law changes since [8]. - ID requirements that have been researched thoroughly and demonstrated to do almost nothing to reduce fraud but virtually always lower turnout, usually to minority populations. [7] Aside from the topic of voter turnout itself, there are many other ways the democratic ideal is attacked by policy, such as gerrymandering[2], or the fact that we often refer to political parties as "half the country" when in reality only ~26% of the electorate voted for the current president[3], it was a single-digit percentage that voted for each of the eventual candidates in the primaries[4], and even "the electorate" is a lot smaller than our adult working population because felons aren't allowed to vote and we imprison more adults (mostly from poor and underserved populations) than any other industrialized nation. [5] All this to say, yes, there's a lot of understandable apathy in our system, and we shouldn't judge their lack of desire to vote as some kind of moral failing. But there are many people who would love to participate in a democratic process but there are many concrete (and solvable) factors (with evidence and history beyond "an assumption") preventing participation, and the end result almost always favors a small group of people who don't represent the general population and already have a lot of power. [1]: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/elle-vargas-primary-directive-on-elections-interference [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/01/this-is-the-best-explanation-of-gerrymandering-you-will-ever-see/?utm_term=.58b2297c703c [3]: https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-2016/index.html [4]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/01/us/elections/nine-percent-of-america-selected-trump-and-clinton.html [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate [6]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html [7]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/04/new-evidence-that-voter-id-laws-skew-democracy-in-favor-of-white-republicans/?utm_term=.5ddefa4ccf27 [8]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/welcome-to-the-first-presidential-election-since-voting-rights-act-gutted-179737/

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

I could even argue that lower turnout leads to better governance. If you don't care enough to pay attention, if you don't care enough to investigate the candidates, then I'd prefer that you also don't care enough to go vote. If you do go vote, you (you the hypothetical uninformed voter, not you, my reader) are going to vote for the candidate that had the most ads. I don't want elections being decided by voters who are making decisions that way.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Thank you for saying that. I have only managed to vote twice in my life, in part because I don't want to pick a name at random and have been rather overwhelmed by events, yet I have had people give me a hard time about that, like it's my fault if bad candidates got elected because I didn't bother to pick a name at random. And it always infuriates me to be told that I should vote anyway, even if it is random name picking.