People don’t vote because they all love and trust me. They want me to make all their political decisions for them. So I vote however I wish, knowing that I have all the love and trust of those who are willing to let me make their decisions for them.
Think of the candidate who you really, really do NOT want to win. Think that he/she will have people voting for him/her no matter what. You can individually counteract one of the votes for that scary person. If you don’t vote, they get one more bump toward victory.
In case you don’t appreciate how close the last Presidential election was, look here.
FL (537 decided outcome out of 5.9 million votes)
IA (4144 out of 1.28 million votes) or
NM (with a whopping 366 votes deciding the winner out of 58,000)
WI (5708 votes decided out of 2.5 million votes counted)
Surreal, Tree Boy, MrVisible, thank you.
Could we hear more from people who don’t vote, haven’t voted, or didn’t vote for a long time? I’m more interested in finding out why from those who actually made that choice, rather than projecting reasons onto them.
Well, in my small town a city council member got elected on a two vote margin. Ok, that may not be controlled by ONE vote, but if you could get your spouse and a friend to go along with you the election goes your way. 
There was also a school board member got on with 7 write in votes, all from his family and friends. 
I started out in Canada. Not one second of my education was devoted to politics. I grew up not knowing what politics were, what they were for, the difference between Liberal and Conservative and New Democrat. I couldn’t call myself one or the other because I haven’t the faintest clue what they mean.
I have voted three times. 1) to get Pierre Trudeau out of office, 2) to get Joe Clark out of office, and 3) to get Brian Mulroney out of office.
I have always had a strong distaste for politicians. Many of the ones who make it to the higher echelons of power are monied people who come from monied people. They are degreed to the teeth, they’re ex-lawyers and judges and CEOs. The kind of people who haven’t spent any time being broke, unable to find a job, or having to sell their possessions for money to feed their children one more day. They know nothing of street crime or disenfranchised youth. They all seem to be after power and influence to get themselves even more power and influence, despite what they might have said (which was written for them by somebody else) during the elections.
Now I live in the US. I’m not a citizen, so I can’t vote. However, I produce a weekly news discussion program on an all-news radio station. We’re the only radio outlet in the market with a news department, so our guests are nearly always politicians. I have never witnessed such a parade of total buffoons in my life! The sheer vacuousness and egomania of these people is staggering! We sit in the control room and can only shake our heads in disbelief at some of the stuff that comes out of their mouths. Some of the callers to the program seem to know more about what’s going on than the guests do. A local TV weatherman ran for office here, and on the program, he proved himself to be such an idiot that not only did he not get enough votes to win anything, he eventually moved away, due to whatever credibility he may have had being evaporated by his own words. (Besides which, he got busted for taking a leak in somebody’s bushes while he was out stumping…)
What it boils down to, sadly, is as was mentioned previously, voting not for the best candidate, but for the lesser of two evils. And I think that makes a mockery of the whole process.
I fully expect someone will rake me over the coals for what I’ve said here, but I didn’t come to have an argument with anyone. The OPoster asked to hear from people who didn’t vote and why. These were my two cents’ worth. Thank you for reading them.
I’m usually more interested in voting for proposals than I am candidates. I guess I just don’t trust anyone else to make my laws for me.
I would love to see a system where instead of just watching votes on C-span, we could hit a button to vote for the issue ourselves.
>Why don’t people vote?
'cause they live in the wrong country Here in Australia you are obliged to vote in national and state elections, so we routinely get 90-95% turnout.
Makes some of the slackers think before voting, so I’m all for it.
Every politician knows that he can be as evil as he wants and still get elected as long as he isn’t significantly more evil than his opponent.