
Half of Americans Don’t Vote. What Are They Thinking? - ablekh
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/19/knight-nonvoter-study-decoding-2020-election-wild-card-115796
======
keiferski
Discussion on the fact that over half of the population doesn't vote is always
built upon a number of assumptions. To name a few:

\- a democratic system in which everyone is "required" to participate in the
political process is desirable state of affairs

\- the voting process is the best way of choosing these democratic
representatives, as opposed to a civil servant exam, selection by lot
(randomness, like jury duty), or some other type of system. Personally I like
the idea of combining the two: pass an exam to be placed into a "potentials"
pool, from which representatives are selected randomly. Then have a background
check after that, etc.

\- That the best solution is to _figure out why people aren 't voting and
change their mind,_ and not to develop a different method of selecting
government officials

It would be much more interesting (to me, at least) to explore other forms of
government that maintain the benefits of civil liberties, open society, etc.
without relying on the flawed media popularity contest that is voting. There
is plenty of political and philosophical writing on this - we simply need to
be willing to try it out.

~~~
hhas01
“a democratic system in which everyone is "required" to participate in the
political process is desirable state of affairs”

Citizens of a democratic nation have _one job to do_.

If they’re not doing it, the question must be Why?

~~~
defertoreptar
Apathy, or they find more value in spending their attention and time doing
something else, a feeling like their vote won't change a thing, or straight up
laziness.

I don't actually think it's important why someone doesn't vote, so long as
their right to vote isn't impeded. I have a theory that society, like many
other systems, tends to take on more stable forms over time. Part of the
reason democracy has been so stable is that it allows people, who would
otherwise be unhappy and want to change things, a chance to have a say. Non-
voters are already a "stable" part of society, since they apparently don't
have strong enough feelings to go vote for something different. I don't see a
problem with that.

~~~
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA
I expect that a substantial number of nonvoters suffer from learned
helplessness.

------
zebnyc
My wife, who recently became an American, asked me what she should fill for
her voter registration forms. My response was, "Living in the SF bay area,
Your opinion would count only if you vote for the Democratic party primaries.
The general elections don't matter".

I am happy to be proven wrong but sadly I think this is the state of affairs
now.

~~~
toast0
For the presidential election in California? Yeah, really only the primary
matters, and only for the two major parties, and only one of them has a real
field of candidates this year.

For other offices, many of these are highly contested, and the top two primary
system makes primary voting more important than it used to be; especially
since there are fewer voters, your vote has more weight.

For all of measures and propositions, many of those are highly contested, and
you should vote on those. Especially in California, where anything enacted by
voters cannot be changed except by voters, unless its found unconstitutional
by the courts. (Washington state legislators are apparentlty sometimes able to
modify or repeal voter passed measures; other states may vary)

------
egypturnash
There is barely any attention paid in this article to things like the fact
that if you are in certain demographic segments you are very likely to be
juggling several part-time jobs that schedule at the last minute, and have to
deal with getting to the polls on a day that is not a mandatory holiday. Or
with the way these demographics tend to be underserved by polling locations,
and targeted by “vote fraud prevention” measures deliberately designed to
disenfranchise them. There are a couple sentences that vaguely glance in this
direction when it discusses that there can be a lot of bureaucracy around
registering.

Also not mentioned: prisoners and ex-cons are largely denied the right to
vote. Florida lifting that on ex-cons should be _interesting_.

~~~
kube-system
Prisoners, yes, but ex-cons largely do get back their right to vote. A lot of
states have changed these laws in the past couple decades.

41 states do not permanently disenfranchise people for convictions. 6 states
permanently disenfranchise _some_ convicts (only for certain crimes or repeat
offenders), and only 3 states disenfranchise all felony convicts.

[https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/voter-
restoration/...](https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/voter-
restoration/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map)

~~~
egypturnash
Oh thanks, I am glad to be wrong about that one!

------
badrabbit
To be clear: I am only stating this so anyone curious can know why people like
me don't vote. I am not pushing any agenda.

I don't vote on purpose, I see that as a vote against the typical choices
given,none of which I can reconcile with my views in any of the important
topics. Not stating a political opinion,just telling you what I am thinking
when I don't vote. I have no plan on being in politics. I know better than to
think a dual party system is significantly different than a single party
system. I also believe the freedom and liberties of the west are mostly a
result of a strong military and abundance of resources. Right now there are so
many messed up things, I cannot vote for one thing and accept a lesser
evil,not only because I believe you should never accept evil of any magnitude
but also because the evils of either side are too extreme for me to be
involved with. I don't mind paying taxes, contributing to society and trying
to be come a better social person but the duopoly of US politics is a system I
must vote against by not voting at all. I don't care which bad guy wins.

I do think that the big parties should be broken up so that people actually
have a voice. I like how parliamentary systems form a coalition of different
parties to form a government. No confidence votes against the PM and it's
never some guy running for office to rescue the country like in the US. It
shouldn't be about any single person. I have no hope of any of this happening.
I see the US swinginf from one extreme to the other tearing itself apart to
the delight of its foes, why should I help destroy the one country keeping the
balance of power in the world , so that wars break out and millions die? Will
no one listen to history's plea?

That's my perspective at least, I am sure others have their reason. But to a
lesser degree at least, I think many just don't agree with the choices so they
choose "none of the above". Look at any site with political leanings,
centrists are mocked and hated by everyone. It's not so much the government
system but the people themselves that can't grapple with magnitudes of the
extreme sides they are taking.

~~~
Retric
Voting 3rd party has vastly more impact than obtaining. A great deal of effort
by both parties is spent to get poeple to stay home on Election Day, and not
voting just tells them it’s working.

~~~
badrabbit
In an ideal world you're right. In reality, unless you are in a swing state
and very active in politics 3rd party vote means nothing, I would vote just
for the sake of it but there needs to be a moderate 3rd party to start with.

I have noticed a division of two means us vs them. A division of more than two
is us vs us (we need to work together not apart since no one can have a super
majority)

~~~
Retric
Modern Whigs are very centrist, though it’s really more extreme parties that
pull the Republicans and Democrats apart. Without that pull the parties then
to adopt the vast majority of viewpoints excluding a few token issues.

------
Ididntdothis
One simple change would be to vote on Sundays or make election Tuesday a
mandatory holiday. Especially if you are low income and on a fixed schedule
voting is very inconvenient.

~~~
mjevans
Drop-off and mail-in ballots where there is ample time to fill out a ballot
are also a great option. This exists where I live in (all cities), King
County, WA; and probably other parts of the state too.

~~~
sircastor
We do mail in ballots in Oregon, and I see no reason it shouldn't be
implemented in all states and jurisdictions. It solves so many issues with
voting.

------
paulsutter
On Twitter I saw a suggestion that the state with the highest voter turnout
should have the first primary in the next election. This might create some
incentive for people to turn out and vote (will post link if I can find the
tweet)

~~~
gxon
I saw that too. It would be interesting to see what different states do to try
and increase voter turnout. Maybe some even give cash incentives to voters
assuming that the economic benefit from being first/early in the primary
outweighs the cost of the program.

------
ryandvm
Homo Economicus does not vote. That is, on an individual level, voting is not
a rational activity.

Look at it this way - let's say it takes you 15 minutes to drive to your
polling place, 30 minutes to vote, and Lord knows how many hours to figure out
which candidates you should even vote for. And what is the value of a single
vote? Specifically, what is the chance that a single vote will change an
election? _Almost_ zero.

Ergo, at the individual level, the effort of participating in the electoral
process does not appear to be a rational choice.

~~~
platz
And yet, it is only the folks that irrationally do vote that make the
individual contributions that ultimately add up to something larger.

I think this is a failure of the philosophy of individualism and the
atomization of the individual from society, instead of an understanding where
people take part and do things in society that primarily benefit society
instead of themselves

------
jb775
Australia fines citizens $20 if they don't vote....I wonder what impact that
would have on voting in the US?

~~~
erentz
This would just be a fine on poor people. In many US states there are active
efforts to disenfranchise and suppress voting such as moving voting places,
not providing enough booths so there are big queues and delays, automatically
removing people from rolls, etc.

The US first needs to establish an independent electoral commission to set
district boundaries and run the elections fairly like in other countries.

~~~
dane-pgp
A great idea, but I think the problem is convincing politicians to appoint
independent commissioners that may remove their electoral advantage. Perhaps a
necessary step is to come up with a rule that can objectively determine how
gerrymandered a given set of boundaries are, and then convince enough people
in both parties to agree to the same limit:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Efficiency_gap_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Efficiency_gap_calculation)

~~~
thu2111
The UK has such a commission. It hasn't worked out well. The commissioners
turned out to be very publicly stating strong political opinions (which were
mostly homogenous). If you want to run elections that's the sort of behaviour
it should go without saying you don't engage in. Their decisions are regularly
criticised for being extremely biased and they've been slapped down by judges
in some high profile cases, where the judges basically said the commission
didn't understand electoral law and/or appeared to be deliberately engaging in
political harassment.

The UK commission doesn't set electoral boundaries though, Parliament does
that. They just run other aspects of elections.

~~~
dane-pgp
> Their decisions are regularly criticised for being extremely biased

Regularly criticised by whom? I'm guessing the side that is found to be
breaking electoral rules.

> they've been slapped down by judges in some high profile cases, where the
> judges basically said the commission didn't understand electoral law and/or
> appeared to be deliberately engaging in political harassment.

Maybe the law was vague, or maybe, get this, the judges were biased and the
commissioners were actually correct.

Unfortunately we're now living in a world where politicians and institutions
and court cases are evaluated not based on any objective truth, but on whether
"my side" beats "the other side". Perhaps it's always been like that, as the
history of gerrymandering shows, but it does seem that the polarisation and
tribalism is more extreme or more blatant now.

~~~
thu2111
You seem to be doing exactly that, no? You're assuming without having
researched the details that the Commission must be correct and everyone else
must be wrong. At least that's how your reply reads.

Politicians have criticised it. Journalists have criticised it. The
Metropolitan Police have criticised it. High court judges have criticised it.
Exonerated members of the public have criticised it. The archives here detail
various setbacks and screwups the EC has had, along with evidence for the
prior sentences:

[https://order-order.com/tag/electoral-commission/](https://order-
order.com/tag/electoral-commission/)

The EC is the kind of thing you find in a banana republic. It's indefensible.
You can't claim to be a neutral arbiter of fairness in elections when
investigations you refer to the police are repeatedly thrown out because they
were so shoddily done, when multiple judges say you don't understand electoral
law, when it's been found you issued incorrect advice to campaigners, when
politicans from both major parties are calling for you to be disbanded and -
most critically - when the people running it _repeatedly proclaim their hatred
for political causes and parties in public_. The idea these people are
unbiased is absurd. The director of regulation at the EC posted this to
Facebook:

"[Louise Edwards] cannot believe she lives under a Tory PM again! What is
wrong with people? Do they not remember the last time? Words fail me, grrr."

and

"Just can't understand what people were thinking. Do they not remember the
Tories before?"

and

"[Louise Edwards] doesn't want to live under a Tory government"

How can anyone believe British elections are run fairly when the people
trusted to run them literally post on the internet that they don't want one
side to win? Unsurprisingly, people don't.

The entire thing is a textbook example of how completely corrupted government
bureaucracies can get the moment they're not directly run by people who might
lose their job at the next election. The EC should have been shut down years
ago.

------
BubRoss
Who has the time to spend a few hours making sure they can vote, where to
vote, and how to get there on a single weekday that isn't a holiday?

Not people struggling to keep their lives together or anyone without some
leverage in their life.

Add in that the majority of the population in the US presidential have votes
that are statistically irrelevant and I think parts of the problem become
clear.

Add to that the two party system that encourages the largest extremes from
each side and most people probably don't actively want to vote for anyone.

My simplistic refinement would be lots of candadites with points that could be
put towards or against anyone in any amount. Maybe even more than one round of
voting to eliminate someone mostly just taking votes away from someone else.

------
Natales
Many people forget there are almost always a lot of other things in the ballot
that can affect your life much more directly, and if you happen to live in a
city of say, 30K people, your vote has a lot more impact than anything
happening at the national level.

Even if you choose not to vote for a national-level issue/candidate/party, at
least do participate in things that affect your community.

------
olliej
Voting takes _hours_ , and you are not guaranteed time off to vote.

Then there are the various state voter suppression acts that deliberately make
it harder to vote (and IMO constitute an unconstitutional poll tax).

Those all make voting _expensive_.

Here’s what I’d want: states must be required to provide enough voting booths
and facilities to keep voting lines to less than (say) 30 minutes. They must
ensure that 90% (say) of the voting populace is with 30 minutes of a polling
facility, and 80% within 30 minutes walking distance of such.

States with voter suppression laws must provide IDs for free, and have similar
to the above facilities for applying for those free IDs. Their turn around for
those IDs must be timely, and delivery of the IDs should also be free.

Note: any step that _requires_ a citizen to pay money to get an voting ID is a
poll tax, and therefore unconstitutional.

------
prirun
I don't vote: it is a contest of choosing the most convincing liar IMO. If we
could vote every year, and vote them out when they do not fulfill their
campaign promises, I'd be more inclined to vote.

I'd much rather have a lottery system, because I trust the general population
to be honest much more than I trust politicians to be honest.

------
trappist
Imagine you succeed in persuading a large number of nonvoters to vote. Do you
have some reason to suspect they would make better decisions, i.e. choose
better candidates, than people who currently vote? I could never understand
why voting _per se_ was held to be a virtue. If you don't care or don't know
what you're doing, why should I want you to vote?

------
sys_64738
Not voting is a people's right. It's just you can't complain about the
government when things don't work out.

~~~
rascul
Complaining about the government is my right and it is not dependant on
whether I voted or not.

~~~
sys_64738
Except when you complain and say you didn’t vote will lead to head shakes in
your direction then you being ignored from that point on.

~~~
rascul
Does that actually happen? I've never seen it, and there's been plenty of
times I've been potentially susceptible to such a practice. Maybe my arguments
tend to be evaluated on a different metric.

~~~
sys_64738
You are special then!

------
ilaksh
I am 42 and was going to vote for the first time, but my candidate (Andrew
Yang) had to drop out. So I'm not voting.

------
pengaru
Obligatory Carlin on the topic of voting:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk)

Edit:

American Dream chaser:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-14SllPPLxY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-14SllPPLxY)

------
meddlepal
I live in a single party state. My vote doesn't matter.

------
ablekh
Interesting article on extremely important topic.

TL;DR: VOTE! Make your voice heard!

~~~
ksec
>TL;DR: VOTE! Make your voice heard!

What if none of the candidate represent your voice?

~~~
Natales
I often think about that when I'm waiting for my meal in a plane, seating in
row 33 or higher. Odds are my choice won't be available when they finally get
to me. I can choose not to eat, but it's more likely I will end up choosing
from what's available.

In essence: educate yourself, and choose what you believe would would be the
least worst for the country as a whole.

~~~
mirimir
What if you were allergic to peanuts, and only stuff fried in peanut oil was
available?

~~~
riahi
As a fun fact, peanut oil is so highly processed that most people with peanut
allergy can eat it.

[https://acaai.org/resources/connect/ask-allergist/does-
peanu...](https://acaai.org/resources/connect/ask-allergist/does-peanut-oil-
cause-allergic-reactions)

~~~
mirimir
I watched someone almost die from eating Chinese food fried in peanut oil.
Maybe _some_ peanut oil is pure enough, but there's no guarantee. The link is
pretty clear about that, but your paraphrase is dangerous misinformation.

~~~
riahi
Both my comment and the website linked literally say “most people can eat
peanut oil”. That’s hardly dangerous misinformation.

I’m willing to bet the restaurant had peanut cross contamination in the
kitchen.

~~~
mirimir
The linked website says that _some_ peanut oil is OK for most people to eat.
But not cold-pressed etc oil. That's a crucial distinction. And for
commercially prepared food, even if you're lucky enough to know that it
contains peanut oil, you likely won't know what type it is.

------
atom-morgan
I was thinking, "Between Clinton and Trump, pass"

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
Yikes

------
mynameishere
Perhaps they are thinking along correct mathematical lines. Their one vote
will do nothing, but the time lost is very real.

------
s9w
Because a single vote doesn't matter. It's irrational to vote

~~~
timbit42
If all of the people who thought that way voted, it would matter.

~~~
s9w
But they don't. One vote doesn't influence others - that would be magical
thinking.

------
jqpabc123
Your vote don't matter --- in half the cases. Half the states are already
decided with near certainty. California is voting for the Democratice
candidate, South Carolina is voting for the Republican.

If you vote for or against the pre-determined candidates in these "one party"
states --- your vote don't matter. The only case where your vote might matter
is in a swing state.

The really amazing (and illogical) thing would be if more than 50% voted.

~~~
Retric
House seats make a huge difference not just directly, but also how these lines
are redrawn.

Local elections are also vastly more important than most assume. Roads,
schools, local policing, etc are the services that most affect people in their
day to day lives and that’s mostly decided in local elections.

~~~
jqpabc123
I'm not arguing against _all_ voting. Just pointing why it doesn't matter in a
lot of cases. In the cases where it does matter, vote.

------
dpc_pw
Voting is pointless. People are just brainwashed into believing it's so
important (I don't know how else to call it: they are repeatedly told over and
over again how important democracy is, and voting is like the biggest symbol
of your democratic rights). Even just saying it is going to trigger a strong
emotional reaction, similar to saying that God does not exists to devoted
religious person. Down-votes ensured. :D

In reality in the USA, it's much more effective to just donate $100 to some
political interest group of yours, and be done with it.

