I’ve tried to talk non-voters into voting, But when I found the extent of their political knowledge, I realized it’s better they don’t vote.
My ex-GF didn’t vote till 1996 when she was 37, for Clinton to get his second term. Monicagate deterred her from ever voting again. Whew!
Very good point (and one acknowledged by Jim Hightower in his book called If the Gods Had Wanted Us To Vote, They’d Have Given Us Candidates). Not since I’ve been eligible to vote has there been a presidential candidate whom I would have really felt good about voting for. (I’ve still voted, but only thinking “Well, he might turn out to be okay” or picking the lesser of two evils.) Unless maybe you count the primaries; but I’ve never voted in primaries because I don’t want to declare allegience to either political party—which is probably a reason why more people don’t vote in the primaries.
Then there’s “Will it really make a difference whether I vote?” If a candidate wins by more than one vote, he would have won anyway without my contribution. If a candidate does win by only one vote, you can bet there will be all sorts of investigations and recounts and maybe a new election.
But most people who don’t vote aren’t uninformed or stupid. The way the system is structured, you vote is meaning less in a number of circumstances. If you are in an area dominated by one party, your vote for the other party means nothing. If you suport a third party, your vote is usually meaningless. Sure you can vote just to say you voted, or to help your party reach some goal for funding purposes, but it is typically a fruitless act.
My larger point was that I don’t see many people who truly understand issues. Most are so complex that there are people who spend years trying to become experts on things like the environment, soc. sec., etc. A basic understanding of these things doesn’t impress me. Especially when two people can look at the same information and come to wildly different conclusions based on the biases and baggage they bring to the table. Just take at most of the political GD threads. It boils down to people on both sides saying what don’t you idiots get about “X”. One person’s opinion is no better than the next when both are tinged by bias and ignorance of the facts.
I don’t buy that argument. While it may be true for presidential elections in some states, those very same states have other issues on the ballot that cut across political boundaries. You’ll also find that in very Democrat CA, we have a Republican governor, for example.
This is a better argument, but still represents a small minority.
60% is still a pretty poor turnout for an industrialised democracy (although it’s certainly better than the woeful 49% of 2000). What can the US learn from the countries above it in the list?
That the citizens of Guinea-Bissau are twice as enthusiastic as we are. I mean, 116%? Damn.
I’ve thought a really savvy leader might be able to get pockets of people to vote. Groups of people can simply use the relatively low voter turnout to their advantage. If you’re a group with a relatively small “voice” in political affairs, your voice can get a lot louder, faster, if you up your turnout while the majority stays home. If blacks, for example, voted up in the 80% range you bet they’d be a political force to reckon with, and I’m sure they’d get lot more attention from candidates. Not that all people in a group will necessary agree on issues or vote alike, but they are often lumped together politically and they could use that to their advantage.
The Iraqi election could have served as a great example–it might, still. Didn’t Kurds turn out in record numbers?
That’s what I call “voting irregularities”!
A certain level of intelligence and effort is required to understand the issues of the day. If anyone is incapable or unwilling to fulfill that requirement, I don’t want them in the voting booth. Let them stay home and chant “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry” along with their peers in the studio audience.
Reasonable – the main problem with the weekend is that it inevitably conflicts with one of the religions with a signficiant following. This problem can be solved by spreading the election over the entire weekend, though that has obvious logistical problems.
I don’t see any way to avoid the possibility (or actuality) of these “non-partisan” sources being slanted by selection and omission. I think we just have to leave people to sort things out from the existing plethora of sources (slanted to various degrees in various directions).
Nobody in this thread has yet addressed the following crucial points:
Why is voter turnout less in the U.S. than in other democracies?
Who are these nonvoting Americans? Are they disproportionately poor or working-poor? Or do they come in equal proportion from every social class and educational level?
I know someone who is wealthy, highly-educated, and successful. He didn’t vote because he doesn’t want to be drafted. (He figures voters will be the first to go). Also, he doesn’t think his vote matters.
Where did he get that idea?
Maybe it is tinfoil-hattery, but he thinks if we did need to start a draft and registration with Selective Services has gone into neglect, the govt would just look at voter rolls.
Is this an outlandish notion or something?
I’d prefer that people be more informed, or simply not vote for stupid reasons, then have more people vote in general.
And no, I’m not equating people voting stupidly with people not voting for the candidate I like. Anybody who votes on simple name recognition, for example, I think is a stupid voter. Even if they happen to vote for the candidate I prefer.
Doubtful. One can have intelligence on the day to day issues and choose not to vote, for very valid reasons. How can you equate these people with The Jerry Springer show? And you have evidence that the people in the studio audience aren’t voting? although I’m pretty sure their turnout was high 
As has been said already, why should you vote if you think both the candidates are disasters? Do you really want the US to follow the example of Australia, where, or so I believe, voting is compulsory? It’s the inalienable right of every citizen to say, “A plague on both your houses!”, and stay at home.
Anyway, voting only encourages them.
Perhaps, but anybody who votes on party name recognition is a smart voter – or would be, if party labels really meant something in this country. As it stands, there’s little effective party discipline and the Republican in a given race can easily be more liberal than the Democrat. But perhaps that belongs in a different thread.
I expect you are already aware of the answer to #2 and suspect you are just putting it out there for debate. It’s no secret that economic participation and electoral participation go hand in hand. We would expect those who enjoy more of the fruits of the system to be more interested in maintaining it and studies don’t contradict this. Wealthy people do tend to vote more than the poor. Well educated people tend to acquire more wealth than the uneducated so it stands to reason that they would vote more often. I would imagine a college educated person to be more connected to the system and thus more likely to vote even if their economic situation didn’t turn out so well but haven’t seen any evidence this is so. So I suspect education is a seperate factor but don’t know that for a fact.
As for number one, there are structural and cultural reasons for our low voter turnout. American culture contains a strong dose of distrust of government. This is often attributed by historians to the general lack of feudalism that would necessitate a unifying mass movement to have the state overturn such an inequitable system. For white Americans, at least. Blacks did need state intervention to escape serfdom and, in general, tend to be less distrustful of the possibilities of government even if more discouraged by present realities.
This distrust exists alongside a seemingly contradictory belief that the American constitution creates a government of the highest order. Politicians and individual public bodies may be unworthy of trust but the cunning system of government handed down to us contains “checks and balances” which force the various selfish interests to work together to get anything accomplished. Thus ( Gödel be damned! ) the system is a selfcontained whole and the virtuous citizen can wash her hands of the dirty business of politics without consequences worse than the usual corruption, which can’t be eliminated in any case.
The structural reasons begin with our embarassing electoral system that often seems to be designed to discourage voting rather than the opposite. The inconvenient timing for holding elections has already been addressed. Our household is politically motivated yet I missed the 2002 election because of an out of town business opportunity that arose after the deadline for nonemergency absentee ballots had passed. Mrs 2sense missed the 2000 election because staffing shortages at the hospital required her to work a shift that covered the entire time the polls were open. Other barriers to participation include the mindnumbingly long elections ( campaigning now begins over a year before Election Day requiring a greater investment of attention ) and the “Electoral College” ( “my vote doesn’t count!” ). The most significant barrier seems to be the registration requirement. Those states that don’t require preregistration have significantly higher turnout ( 15 points higher in 2000 ).
Well, in the last elections, Spain had a turnout of about 80%, considerably higher than the 60% of the ones before last. But since the trigger for that was the death of 173 people (the Madrid bombs) I don’t recommend it.
Enough with the black humor, now for a more serious answer:
the non-voters I know, in quite a few countries, are either
The last one was particularly poignant in one EU election where a minority party was 40 votes away from getting 3 seats in the EU Parliament: I personally know more than 50 people who didn’t vote for reason #3 and later felt like banging their heads against the wall. A concrete wall, preferably.
The first one seems to be the most common case among the US nonvoters with whom I’ve talked about this, but admittedly it’s kind of a biased sample. Some of them didn’t know that you can vote on “some” issues (for example you can vote for your local judge if you have a strong opinion there, without having to cast a vote for mayor if you don’t really care).