The short answer is because it’s against state law- apparently what voting fraud their is, seems to be predominantly centered around absentee ballots (the only form of mail in ballots actually allowed). Retirees ARE on that list- 65 and older and disabled people are two distinct categories allowed to vote by mail already. So are people outside the county when the elections happen, which includes military people, college students, etc…
There’s always early voting- it’s open on weekends and can be done at any of the early voting places in your county as well.
And finally, your employer is required to grant you a paid two hour block off within the voting window for voting, IF your normal job schedule doesn’t afford you an unbroken two hour block already. So in your example, your person could have legally left at 5 to ensure they had that 2 hour block. Or if they just can’t leave at 5, then they could have come in as late as 9.
Voter suppression is one thing, but a lot of the gripes I’m hearing seem to align along the notion of “Voting is a pain in my ass, make it easier or I won’t do it!”, which I’m not exactly sympathetic to.
By way of background this page has a nice graphic of turnout percentages by age groups for presidential and midterm elections going back to 1986. The turnout percent for the 18 to 29 age group was WAY up in the 2018 midterms compared to ANY other year in that graph. The norm has been about 20% and in 2014 is was below that; it was over 30% in 2018. In the 2018 midterms younger voters turned out better than most of our groups did when we were in that age group.
The problem isn’t them.
Trying to get some hard numbers I am not so sure that there isn’t a grain of truth to the belief that the group’s turnout was actually fairly good this time too … just way outpaced by the increased turnout in older age groups. The prospect of a Sanders nomination may actually have been responsible for an increased turnout after all … in all age groups, just disproportionately more in less young age groups who were motivated by voting against the prospect of him as the nominee than younger voters for him.
I wonder if there is also something of an overestimation of the baseline power of the “youth vote” – yes, you need it to be sure of winning; but you can’t count on it to win. (BTW thanks to an earlier poster for recognizing the existence of GenXers; it’s not ALL about Boomers…) And with the Sanders phenomenon you may have a situation where those he mobilizes to show up in the street being enthusiastic do not have enough of a multiplier effect on non-activists showing up to vote, at least not in numbers that beat other demographics (plus come on, let’s not be bubbled here, there’s surely a significant part of under-40 voters who are not on his side).
Must say the only candidate who had someone actually knock on my door to remind me of voting day ***was ***Sanders, and I gave the campaign worker props for it.
And yes, suppression is real, but there’s suppression, and there’s people who feel that being inconvenienced makes it not worth the effort – which means they are not existentially invested in the result. (Cue in old man shaking his cane at the kids on the lawn, going “young man, folks were getting killed for trying to get people to vote less than 60 years ago, and you whinge because you can’t do it from an app?”)
Interesting story her about the difference between Bernie supporters and Biden supporters. I’m not sure I agree with everything in it, but food for thought.
Piling on and blaming young people on this. They could vote. They didn’t.
I think Millennials are unfairly maligned as the lazy generation but on this point they are super lazy.
Painting with a broad brush of course. Many of them are very engaged. But nowhere near as many as should be (and by that I mean to say, ideally, absolutely everyone should vote).
I (Gen-Xer) just want to also point out that young person voter turnout doesn’t seem to be much changed these days than it was in my time.
Now whether or not that should be the case, I don’t know. The realistic part of me says that twenty-somethings are what they are, regardless of the time frame, and that this sort of civic disengagement comes with the age. The cynical part of me says that today’s youth is more connected to news/information sources and each other than ever before; they have less excuse to not be aware of where, when, how or who to vote for than any generations in history, including boomers, Gen-Xers, etc… and still behave the same w.r.t. voting as those generations, but manage to bitch about the state of the world a lot more than they did.
I guess where I’m frustrated isn’t so much the low voter turnout among the youth- that’s nothing new. It’s the huge level of vehement bitching and sour grapes about stuff that I hear coming from Millenials and Gen-Z about everything that’s wrong with the world, how boomers have fucked it up for everyone, etc… and THEN these clowns don’t turn out and vote? Put your money where your mouth is and vote, young people, or STFU. You can’t have it both ways.
Young people, always confused :p, have an additional problem, or so I read: Partisan politics has become so virulent that young people are afraid to bring up political topics in conversations with other young people! :eek: Unfortunate, since conversation with friends is the way to educate, get one’s peers involved, and move forward.
Otherwise young people could be leading the way out of the darkness:
. . . . “[A]mong California voters age 18-29, Sanders beat Biden by a staggering 72 percent to 5 percent. In Texas, the margin was 65 percent to 11 percent.”
I’m no Bernie-Brat myself, but I admire the idealism of Bernieists.
You got 81% via the arithmetic 13%/16%. But that figure shows youth turnout as a fraction of average turnout. You could confirm this by Googling “turnout by age” … except that those who should be reporting those stats are apparently using the same App used in the Iowa caucus!
Young person voting turnout in 2018 midterms BLEW AWAY midterm young person voting turnout in your time. And it seems like young person voting turnout this primary was not bad … it was just wasn’t revved like it was in 2018 or '08, and was way out-paced by the turnout in other groups. Bernie relatively owned the demographic but he did not excite them to come out as much as fighting Trumpism did, and hopefully will.
When I read about this recently in an on-line piece, it discouraged me.
I went to university in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. Many of us were apathetic about politics, but I don’t recall anyone being afraid to talk about it.
That’s one election, and it went upward across the board, not just for youth. I don’t think you can point at the 2018 midterms and assume it means anything in particular.
If it stays similarly higher relative to 2016 in 2020, and 2018 in 2022, then we’ll know something. Otherwise, it might just be an anomalous election.
The guy wasn’t saying he was poor. iiandyiiii just assumed he was poor because either “tight work schedule”=poor or “young latino”=poor. He was too busy to explain which one.
It seems easier than trying to force Texas employers (who are legendary in skirting the rules) to just allow mail voting.
Here is an article from the Texas Tribune stating that “voting fraud” in Texas is largely a goofy snipe hunt:
I would think that the burden is on Texas for having to explain why they won’t allow universal mailed in ballots, but that is probably a topic for another thread.
Gen-Xers in their twenties were vastly outnumbered by the Baby Boomers. Younger voters today outnumber the Boomers. If they showed up they could swing things. Not sure if that was really possible for the Xers.
Yeah, at a lot of jobs trying to use your time to vote means you get the ‘not a team player’ badge of dishonor and a nice place at the top of the shit list.
