In other words, two researchers wasted their research money to conclude that there is disproportionate influence of the elite in American politics. Wow, what a robust body of work.
That is also a reality that can be changed. True, it’s not easy, certainly not as easy as making flippant remarks on the ‘interwebs’, but organization, activism, and voting can lead to meaningful change, like the New Deal, like the Civil Rights laws, like the Affordable Healthcare Act.
Effective organization is obviously much more than just voting every few years, I would agree. People do have to be visible in other ways, but activism and voting are connected. Just voting without other forms of visible activism leads to nothing; at the same time, just being an active non-voter, without having the ability of making people in power fear losing that power through the democratic process also leads to nothing.
Oh fuck you, non-voters (not to be confused with voters prevented from voting by unfair barriers) want to have it both ways, they want to be intellectually lazy and contribute to political stagnation and they want to spout off about how their they only ones who really got it figured out; they want to get course credit for being non contributing cunts. And we have to keep dragging you cunts along like this weight around our necks and every couple of years we have to beg you to maybe you know take an hour out of your worthless lives to get up to speed on the basic functions of society and maynpbe make the absolute minimal contribution by dragging your lazy asses to the polls. Meanwhile, because you noncontributing cunts are doing real harm through your crapulence, more and more barriers are being put into place to make it increasingly difficult for our democracy to function and you get to pop up on websites like this and be smug about being a lazy piece of shit.
Sounds like you’re already aware you might as well not even exist. It’s just a matter of time before you stop boring people with your grief process in public like a pussy and go opioid yourself.
Your argument falls apart pretty quickly when it rests on two movie comparisons in the first two paragraphs and both comparisons are really, really stupid.
Not disproportionate; it’s the ONLY influence. You didn’t read it and your “takedown” is pathetic. And “In other words” is always how you start a crooked, dishonest misrepresentation of something.
You say “wow what a robust blablabla.” In other words you like to fuck babies.
I don’t vote. If that causes you to stop reading this, that’s fine. You’ve made up your mind and I’m not about to waste energy trying to convince you of something you can’t be convinced of.
That said, I’d like to share some interesting ideas with the readers who are still here.
Washington was elected in 1789. Do you know what the voter turnout rate was for that? 32.3% of eligible voters voted. And the entire population that could vote? Only 6% were white Protestant males who owned enough land. Only SIX PERCENT of people could vote! And of those could a little less than a third did. Source: US Elections Project - national-1789-present
Did the world end? No. Did the US end? No, it was just getting started (or restarted as the Articles of Confederation had failed miserably). For the first 50 or so years, we had less than 10% of the population voting for anything. The US did just fine.
The idea that the country will fail apart if we don’t have enough voters is demonstrably wrong.
“Your vote matters!” Well, it depends what you mean by “matters”. If you vote because you feel it’s your civic duty and it makes you feel good, then sure, it matters. If you think your vote matters when it comes to actually getting someone elected, you’re mistaken.
No federal vote in the US has been won by a single vote. In fact, vanishingly few state and local votes have been won by a single vote. Your vote doesn’t matter at all for electing a President (even ignoring the Electoral College for a moment). Don’t believe me? How many elections (federal, state and local) were you a part of that were won by a single vote? None. Zero. Zip. You not voting that day would have affected the outcome by exactly nothing.
“But if everyone didn’t vote…”
Stop. Right. There. Your vote doesn’t affect other people’s vote. If you were to drop dead the day before voting, it’d be tragic. But it wouldn’t stop anyone else from voting.
I’ll demonstrate via thought problem. I want to see a movie, but I don’t really feel up to going out in the rain. Wait, if everyone doesn’t go to see a movie all the theaters will go out of business! Therefore, in order to keep the theaters in business, I MUST go see the movie.
It’s fallacious thinking. Things do not work like that.
No. I live in New York. New York is going to go to the democrats for the next 20 years at least. Even if all the people who didn’t vote, had voted, they would have tended towards voting Democratic anyway.
Now, you can make something of an argument for swing states, but even then, iffy at best. At that point we’re not talking about 70% of the population, we’re talking about perhaps 10%.
Freedom of speech isn’t linked to voting. Perhaps you should consider not voting until you’re read the Constitution. Though it is rather ironic that you want to stop her from using her right to freedom speech because she didn’t use her right to vote. Pick a side, man! Either you want people to use their rights or you don’t. You can’t pick and choose.
Well, we’ve been using pretty much the same system for the past hundred years. Even before that, it was mostly the same. Voter turnout peaked after the civil war (go figure) and remained high until around 1900. I think our system is flawed in a number of ways, but I don’t think that alone has made people less likely to vote.
Well, if they’re smart like me, of course they would. Only an idiot would vote for… Turn on TV. Sees Jersey Shore Oh dear God! No one but me should ever vote again!
I am actually really curious to see if there are any trends in how non-voters would vote. Sadly, no one seems to ask this question when they take polls.
This recent Radiolab episode is all about you. The good news is, if our voting system, were like the one in Ireland, I’m pretty sure you WOULD have voted. So, this CAN be fixed.
Do you care at all about your local races? Your mayor, your council, your school board? Do you care about who it is that makes sure that your streets are plowed in the winter and who picks up your trash, and who fills in the potholes?
They actually do have a quite an effect on you, and you can have quite an effect on them. In my community, it really just takes knocking on a couple hundred doors to get a new councilwomen installed and beating out the 20 year incumbent. Not that hard to do, even though she ended up only winning by 37 votes.
The people that you elect to your local offices are also the people who are going to be eligible to go into higher offices. Politicians don’t just spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, they need to be developed. John Boehner, used to be speaker of the house, didn’t start as a speaker, he didn’t even start as a congressman. He started as a member of an HOA board that jurisdiction over a clubhouse and pool. Mike Dewine, recently elected governor of Ohio, didn’t start out as a governor, he started out as a county prosecutor.
Local races matter, not just to the immediate effect of having services that are provided by your local governments, but also to the long range effects of building up a bench of known politicians that can move up the ranks.
So yeah, go vote in your local elections, even if you don’t believe that your vote matters on the national stuff. But, as long as you are there and voting, why not spend a few moments and fill in the stuff for national offices as well.
But, you can also stay home on election day, and feel proud and smug that you are not deigning to participate in your government. You probably will then continue to criticize the very government that you refuse to try to change.
One last thing. I can’t tell how you voted, but I can tell that you voted. So, if I am a politician, and I see a neighborhood that has high voter participation, I’m going to care about what the people in that neighborhood have to say. If I see that it has a lower turnout, then I can safely ignore their concerns.
I just happened to go back through a thread encouraging people to vote and encountered one of these sheep, They’re 21 years old and going on about how they’ve seen the system and know it’s fundamentally broken, and that voting is just a bandaid. They whine about how nothing matters, despite 2016 and Trump, acting like all politicians.
There I actually rebutted it with the obvious about how Republicans want college age progressives not to vote. That they fell for the con. And other stuff y’all have mentioned.
But here I just want to let off some steam that this shit still goes on. What the fuck happened to young people, who used to be seeming to get smarter and smarter about these sorts of tricks? Did lead wind up in the water again?
Does it matter if I care? A single vote doesn’t affect any of that.
I do not get 37 votes.
Whether they matter is irrelevant if I can’t do anything about it.
For all the reasons I initially stated.
Can I assume you don’t criticize Russia or Cuba or North Korea. Because I very much doubt you do anything to change those governments. And who says I feel smug about it? I came to a rational choice. I’m happy to defend that choice if people want to question it. I don’t take any particular pride in the fact that I don’t vote.
And I get exactly one vote. That isn’t going to sway a politician to visit (or stay away).
Self-rule is a collective process, not an individual one. Your vote isn’t simply about what you think you get out of it. It’s a civic duty. Self government by people collectively depends on the informed, responsible participation of all people. The more that people shirk that responsibility, the weaker a self-governed society becomes, and the more likely it is that an autocrat makes those decisions. Democracies can select unqualified, incompetent people, but democracy allows people to learn from and fix their mistakes. Autocracies don’t allow you to fix mistakes nearly as easily.
It doesn’t matter if you care, it only matters if you vote. You are not being edgy or jaded or cynical, you are just being lazy.
I did. I knocked on a couple hundred doors, and I do feel as though it was through those efforts that we pushed her over the top.
The only way to ensure that your voice isn’t heard is not to vote.
Those were silly reasons, just rationalizing and justifying your decision to not spend any time or effort contributing to your community.
I do not live under their governance. I do have my feelings on what would be better for them, but I do not have any stake in their country, and no vote for them either. If I lived in those countries, then I would want to have the opportunity to voice my opinio on the manner of their governance.
No, you rationalized a choice to be lazy. What does voting hurt? Really, what does it cost you to go to the polling place and make your mark? You can even vote absentee in most places, and not even have to leave the comfort of your home. What is it that you find to be more important and a higher priority for the 3 minutes of your life that you would spend voicing your opinion to those who are responsible for your governance?
You have spent more time bragging about not voting in these posts alone than it would take you to vote. How can that possibly be a rational decision?
That you would then go public, and brag about your choice and criticize those who do take their duties as citizens seriously, means that you feel that you are better than those who participate in the democratic process. That your decision to throw away that which our ancestors fought and died for somehow is a superior decision to honoring the sacrifices that have lead to us having fairly universal suffrage. That is being smug. That is being proud of your decision.
Didn’t say anything about visits, I was speaking of caring about whether you live or die.
If you don’t vote, they don’t.
That’s because they have not use logic or reason to come to a rational conclusion that not voting is superior, it is that they have rationalized being lazy and apathetic.
In all fairness to the poster, assuming he’s legit and not a troll, I have no idea what they teach in schools nowadays. I wonder what value system the “No Child Left Behind” children have.
I suspect many of them look at technology and modern communication platforms and think that people who write algorithms are the world’s problem solvers - and who could argue with them? Creativity and applied mathematics can solve a lot of the world’s problems. But the humanities are still important. Understanding the human animal and how the human brain behaves will never not be important.