6 ms·

It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 19

by pton_xd 8mo ago

It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0]. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalstats_ch2_tbl1.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...

mystraline 8mo ago
"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better. There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state. But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen. But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
- decremental 8mo ago
  [dead]
- koolba 8mo ago
  > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too. > We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male. > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view? > Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state. I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance. > But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen. Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon. > But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results. The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
  - RHSeeger 8mo ago
    > > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. > Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too. Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here. > > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. > We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view? Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter. > The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States. Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.
  - Arainach 8mo ago
    >Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too. There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no. >I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.) >We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view? Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.
  - lostlogin 8mo ago
    > The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States. Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for? When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted? There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?
- shiroiuma 8mo ago
  >"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better. This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly). So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places). So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election. >We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix. >A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too. More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?
  - thayne 8mo ago
    I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).
    - reverius42 8mo ago
      "less than 50%" being 49.8%. Kind of winning on a technicality there.
      - crote 8mo ago
        A big problem of the American two-party system is that you can't distinguish a vote against one party from a vote for the other party: Did all of that 49.8% vote for Trump, or was he the "lesser of two evil" for a lot of people who genuinely hated Harris?
- WalterBright 8mo ago
  > mandate required voting I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for. A right to vote includes the right to not vote.
  - defrost 8mo ago
    Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom. It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice. They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
  - autoexec 8mo ago
    > A right to vote includes the right to not vote. Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.
    - WalterBright 8mo ago
      Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.
      - x______________ 8mo ago
        Living in a civilized society with other people should have its social responsibilities, amongst others.
        Ray20 8mo ago
        Yes, and most of this measures result in decisions being made by the most irresponsible people. Prisoners voting is madness. They are in too dependent a position to believe that their vote will reflect their votes. On the contrary, voting should be banned not only for prisoners but also for people working for the government in any capacity. People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes. Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful? If someone believes they have more important things to do than vote, why force them to vote?
- RHSeeger 8mo ago
  > A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience. Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.
  - hellojesus 8mo ago
    I love mail in voting, but it does run the unique risk of having verifiable votes to third parties, which means it allows pay-for-votes. No election can mitigate this so long as your vote is provable to a third party.
- mrighele 8mo ago
  There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA. An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday. The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design). Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day. The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do. If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA
  - lostlogin 8mo ago
    Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state. I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      In the US, states elect the president, not the people individually. This is a pretty foundational element of our constitution.
      - lostlogin 8mo ago
        Having a president which a minority of cast votes picked is a problem in my view.
        jandrewrogers 8mo ago
        The President is the representative of the constituent State governments of America, not the people. That is why it is the States that vote. The only part of the Federal government that is intended to proportionally represent the people, and is in practice, is the House of Representatives in Congress. This is a good and appropriate thing. States are approximately countries. Most laws only exist at the State level e.g. most common crimes don't exist in Federal law. The overreach of the Federal government claiming broad authority over people is an unfortunate but relatively recent (20th century) phenomenon. The US does seem to be returning to States having more autonomy, which I'd say is a good thing.
- yazantapuz 8mo ago
  > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. In Argentina, elections are held on Sundays.
- rayiner 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mystraline 8mo ago
    > Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children. Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned? It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more. As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'. > Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better. So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles. It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow". > Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated). Holy crap, the dog whistles. Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor" Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves. And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?
    - rayiner 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - tptacek 8mo ago
        You don't believe in social science. Sorry, I mean social "science". It feels like it'd be rude to quote you on that point, but it's one of your most consistent arguments and it's not reasonable to expect people not to notice the special pleading you're doing around it. It'd be like me suddenly talking about the virtues of DNSSEC.
thayne 8mo ago
That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.
- reverius42 8mo ago
  I think he actually did get more than half the votes this time. "Staying home" is not actually a vote, as much as people want it to be in their heart of hearts. edit: sorry, I was wrong, he did not quite clear 50% -- looked it up and he got 49.8%.
  - lostlogin 8mo ago
    The measure that interests me os the percentage of eligible voters that picked Trump - 31.6%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
- mhb 8mo ago
  Don't all the candidates base their strategies on the existing electoral structure? Why would he have wasted resources optimizing for a metric that isn't relevant? You don't know what the outcome would have been if he did that.
crote 8mo ago
Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%. The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  If you want people to vote at over 90% you need to make it compulsory as Australia does. IMO the problem with doing this is that the people who don't care or don't believe it matters are now going to be annoyed that they have to do it. They will vote randomly, or just pick the first candidate listed, etc. just to be done with it. I saw the same behavior in school by kids who didn't care about the standardized tests they had to take. They just filled in bubbles on the answer sheet at random. If you don't care enough to inform yourself about the candidates or at least have a party affiliation, it's probably best that you don't vote.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
    This is nulled by randomizing the candidates position on the ballots.
  - mrguyorama 8mo ago
    If you think the people who CURRENTLY vote "Care enough to inform themselves" then you are very silly. Stupid people already vote. Wrong people already vote. Your system has to accept that interference no matter what.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  The point of letting people vote is to make people feel as though they're involved in the process so they're less likely to cause social unrest. If somebody is too apathetic to vote, they're also too apathetic to cause trouble and therefore it's not a real problem that they didn't vote.

by pton_xd 8mo ago

mystraline 8mo ago

"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better. There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state. But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen. But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.

decremental 8mo ago
[dead]
koolba 8mo ago
> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too. > We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male. > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view? > Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state. I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance. > But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen. Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon. > But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results. The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
- RHSeeger 8mo ago
  > > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. > Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too. Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here. > > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. > We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view? Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter. > The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States. Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.
- Arainach 8mo ago
  >Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too. There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no. >I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.) >We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view? Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.
- lostlogin 8mo ago
  > The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States. Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for? When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted? There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?
shiroiuma 8mo ago
>"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better. This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly). So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places). So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election. >We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix. >A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too. More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?
- thayne 8mo ago
  I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).
  - reverius42 8mo ago
    "less than 50%" being 49.8%. Kind of winning on a technicality there.
    - crote 8mo ago
      A big problem of the American two-party system is that you can't distinguish a vote against one party from a vote for the other party: Did all of that 49.8% vote for Trump, or was he the "lesser of two evil" for a lot of people who genuinely hated Harris?
WalterBright 8mo ago
> mandate required voting I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for. A right to vote includes the right to not vote.
- defrost 8mo ago
  Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom. It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice. They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
- autoexec 8mo ago
  > A right to vote includes the right to not vote. Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.
  - WalterBright 8mo ago
    Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.
    - x______________ 8mo ago
      Living in a civilized society with other people should have its social responsibilities, amongst others.
      - Ray20 8mo ago
        Yes, and most of this measures result in decisions being made by the most irresponsible people. Prisoners voting is madness. They are in too dependent a position to believe that their vote will reflect their votes. On the contrary, voting should be banned not only for prisoners but also for people working for the government in any capacity. People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes. Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful? If someone believes they have more important things to do than vote, why force them to vote?
RHSeeger 8mo ago
> A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience. Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.
- hellojesus 8mo ago
  I love mail in voting, but it does run the unique risk of having verifiable votes to third parties, which means it allows pay-for-votes. No election can mitigate this so long as your vote is provable to a third party.
mrighele 8mo ago
There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA. An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday. The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design). Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day. The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do. If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA
- lostlogin 8mo ago
  Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state. I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    In the US, states elect the president, not the people individually. This is a pretty foundational element of our constitution.
    - lostlogin 8mo ago
      Having a president which a minority of cast votes picked is a problem in my view.
      - jandrewrogers 8mo ago
        The President is the representative of the constituent State governments of America, not the people. That is why it is the States that vote. The only part of the Federal government that is intended to proportionally represent the people, and is in practice, is the House of Representatives in Congress. This is a good and appropriate thing. States are approximately countries. Most laws only exist at the State level e.g. most common crimes don't exist in Federal law. The overreach of the Federal government claiming broad authority over people is an unfortunate but relatively recent (20th century) phenomenon. The US does seem to be returning to States having more autonomy, which I'd say is a good thing.
yazantapuz 8mo ago
> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. In Argentina, elections are held on Sundays.
rayiner 8mo ago
[flagged]
- mystraline 8mo ago
  > Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children. Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned? It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more. As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'. > Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better. So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles. It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow". > Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated). Holy crap, the dog whistles. Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor" Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves. And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?
  - rayiner 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tptacek 8mo ago
      You don't believe in social science. Sorry, I mean social "science". It feels like it'd be rude to quote you on that point, but it's one of your most consistent arguments and it's not reasonable to expect people not to notice the special pleading you're doing around it. It'd be like me suddenly talking about the virtues of DNSSEC.

thayne 8mo ago

That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.

reverius42 8mo ago
I think he actually did get more than half the votes this time. "Staying home" is not actually a vote, as much as people want it to be in their heart of hearts. edit: sorry, I was wrong, he did not quite clear 50% -- looked it up and he got 49.8%.
- lostlogin 8mo ago
  The measure that interests me os the percentage of eligible voters that picked Trump - 31.6%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
mhb 8mo ago
Don't all the candidates base their strategies on the existing electoral structure? Why would he have wasted resources optimizing for a metric that isn't relevant? You don't know what the outcome would have been if he did that.

crote 8mo ago

Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%. The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.

SoftTalker 8mo ago
If you want people to vote at over 90% you need to make it compulsory as Australia does. IMO the problem with doing this is that the people who don't care or don't believe it matters are now going to be annoyed that they have to do it. They will vote randomly, or just pick the first candidate listed, etc. just to be done with it. I saw the same behavior in school by kids who didn't care about the standardized tests they had to take. They just filled in bubbles on the answer sheet at random. If you don't care enough to inform yourself about the candidates or at least have a party affiliation, it's probably best that you don't vote.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
  This is nulled by randomizing the candidates position on the ballots.
- mrguyorama 8mo ago
  If you think the people who CURRENTLY vote "Care enough to inform themselves" then you are very silly. Stupid people already vote. Wrong people already vote. Your system has to accept that interference no matter what.
mikkupikku 8mo ago
The point of letting people vote is to make people feel as though they're involved in the process so they're less likely to cause social unrest. If somebody is too apathetic to vote, they're also too apathetic to cause trouble and therefore it's not a real problem that they didn't vote.