I have heard the “just one vote” rationale before and find it to be a paradox. Everybody just has one vote. Every election is decided by people who just have one vote. If this rationale were correct, we could say that nobody’s vote mattered. But that’s not true.
Our Virginia gubernatorial election this week was pretty close. The turnout was relatively high, but it seems like the result was determined more by how many voters bothered to vote rather than by actual voter sentiment. It seemed like the GOP was more successful at getting GOP voters to get to the polls–they got more votes but I am wondering what the result would have been if every eligible voter voted. (This is not about party politics, but could be said about nearly every close election.)
McAuliffe actually got 12% more votes in 2021 than Northam did in 2017 (in a state that grew less than 1%/year), so the Dems did increase turnout - but to your point, the GOP did it WAY better, with a whopping 41% jump in GOP votes.
A choice (for example) between incompetence and criminality is not a real choice. If voters had the option of voting “none of the above” - with existing candidates withdrawing in the event both lost and new candidates coming forward - there would be no valid excuse (imo) for not voting.
Such an option has virtually no chance of becoming reality for national elections in the U.S. where the two parties effectively control the election process.
There are certainly things I could do that would have a much higher impact on changing the results of an election than simply casting one vote, such as volunteering for a candidate’s campaign. I’m too lazy for that, though.
Well, and that there is no requirement to have an electoral majority of popular votes in the majority of US elections, so “None Of The Above” is equivalent to abstention.
When they changed the voting age to 18, I registered immediately and have voted in every election for the last 60 years. My husband never voted before he met me because he was afraid he would get called for jury duty. I made him register!
Good for you for getting him to register. IMHO jury duty is a civic obligation. Not registering to vote so you don’t get called for jury duty is shirking two obligations of living in a democracy.
How about, instead of insisting that it’s every person’s responsibility to vote, we say it’s every party’s responsibility to nominate someone worth voting for?
I have voted in nearly every election I could. The exception being school board elections. The candidates (assuming there are more than one; often there aren’t) don’t campaign and I don’t know who stands for what. And my youngest will be 48 next week and none of my kids live here anyway.
I know my one vote won’t decide an election, but then one potato chip won’t ruin my diet. It is basically a civic duty.
I am reminded of the time I was living in Switzerland for a year and my friend and his wife were taking my family out for a Sunday excursion. But first he had to stop and the town hall to vote on a referendum. He did and came out and jumped up and clicked his heels together and explained, “I’ve done my civic duty.” In case you were wondering why his wife didn’t vote (you were, weren’t you?) what he was voting on was women’s suffrage! It passed. In 1971.
I have been registered to vote for 43 years and have called for jury duty twice. That doesn’t seem like a big imposition to me. The first time I made it to the courthouse door for a civil suit and then we were dismissed because there was a last-minute settlement. The second time, I was in a room all day and never got called to actually sit on a jury.
Presumably the parties are nominating people that someone believes are worthy of electing, and most parties have some kind of primary process where registered members of the party select between various candidates to get the one that the most members will vote for in the general election. That this is often driven by the ability of candidates to attract sufficient electoral funds to make it through a months-long election campaign tends to narrow the field and ensure that voters seek the approval of “constituents” who can fund them over their actual human constituents. This isn’t a problem with the parties per se (although both major parties in the United States certainly feed into this and have not made meaningful efforts toward campaign finance reform) but is a more general problem with the duration and cost of electoral campaigns which are typically focused on the promotion of the candidate as a personality rather than the substantive issues. See Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate with Robert Redford which, despite being made almost fifty years ago effectively skewers the problem of extended campaigning and packaging of political candidates. (Or don’t watch it; it will pretty much sour any sense of optimism you might have about electoral campaigns and the behavior that candidates adopt to win them.)
There is the larger problem that political alternatives are very deliberately marginalized such that very few alternate or independent candidates have any chance of even getting significant notice in a campaign. When was the last time you saw members of the Green, Libertarian, or Socialist candidates for president get any amount of airtime much less be invited to a general debate? Even if these candidates cannot win, effectively excluding their views means that you only get to hear about Lizard A and Lizard B, between which the divisions are often narrow and often of no practical consequence compared to substantive policy or fundamental ethical views. The last time off-brand candidates got significant airtime was back in 1992, and primarily because billionaire H. Ross Perot bought his way into public attention and other alternative candidates drafted in his wake including John Hagelin and his “Natural Law Party” platform of Transcendental Meditation for all which got way outsized press coverage for the freak show factor, which pretty much convinced everyone that off-brand politics are just a bunch of weirdo cults lead by odd people with strangely unblinking eyes and nonsensical techno-fascistic views of how politics should work.
I don’t personally really “get” the nonvoter mindset, being as how voting was one of the things I looked forward to as a coveted marker of adulthood when I was a teen.
But I do know at least one person who claims never to vote. She says that it’s because she doesn’t follow political issues and doesn’t know anything about them, so her vote would be meaningless. I presume that that implies she has no interest in knowing anything about the issues, so I don’t argue the matter with her. It’s a free country, even for willful ignorance and dereliction of civic duty.
There are lot of very smart, highly qualified people who want nothing to do with political office. Half the people love you, half the people hate you, you have to compromise on everything, and even the president is paid 0.1% of Tim Cook’s salary. You have to have a thirst for political power, or have a vision for the future that you not only embrace but also really believe you can achieve.
In fact, if you seek the power of political office but not the prestige and trappings (and the campaigning, criticism, and potentially taking blame for things beyond your control) it is far better to the be the silent kingmaker than the king. Dick Cheney is the obvious example in recent memory but nearly all really successful politicians have one or more trusted “advisors” who actually direct policy to their pleasure and preference but rarely step out in front. Most people don’t realize that they are actually voting for these people via their figurehead proxy, but these are the people you should actually look at (if you can figure out who they are) rather than the candidate themselves because it will better inform you about what the candidate will actually do in office vice all of the ‘promises’ they make on the campaign trail.
I’ll vote in a close race where my vote may make a difference, especially at the local level. Voting for President is a waste of time since my state will invariably go for a particularly party and with the electoral vote being all-or-nothing, there much point.
How would it be decided whether a party had nominated someone worth voting for?
Would this be decided by a court? That seems limiting. It would effectively limit candidates to those who were court-approved, which would leave the potential election outcomes in the hands of the politics of the court.
It seems to me what you’d need is some sort of more broad-based system that checked with the whole electorate whether someone was worth voting for. I suppose what you could have is some sort of process by which people vote on which candidate they want, thereby indicating that a given candidate was worth voting for. And the process could be competitive ie parties could each put forward candidates that they think will attract the most votes and therefore be shown to be someone worth voting for.
If you use the latter system, how many votes does someone have to attract before their nominating party is considered to have fulfilled its responsibility of nominating someone “worth voting for”?
Do we take it literally and say if a candidate gets one vote then (strictly speaking) they were “worth voting for”? Seems a bit pointless since presumably every candidate nominated by a party is going to get at least one vote - even if only from their Mom.
Some arbitrary percentage? 20% of the available votes, say? Beneath that and the party cops it for failing to fulfil their responsibility?
A majority? So any nominating party whose candidate loses has not fulfilled its responsibility?
And then what? If a party attempts to fulfil its responsibility by nominating a person they think is worth voting for, but by some process as above it is decided they did not appropriately fulfil that responsibility, is that a criminal offence?
Does the leadership go to prison? Seems kinda chilling doesn’t it? No one would be prepared to nominate any candidate who wasn’t a sure fire thing, as they are risking prison otherwise.
Or I guess the punishment could be that they just lose the election
I’m not entirely convinced you’ve thought this all through.
I think you are taking this too literally. It would be decided that the parties had candidates worth voting for if 100% of the voters were motivated to vote for one or the other.
In many elections, especially the last few presidential ones, I vote for the lesser of two evils. I rarely think any of the candidates are really stellar. I just vote for “good enough.” I can see some voters throwing up their hands saying, “I can’t vote for the moron and I can’t vote for the crook. So I guess I’m not voting this year.”