Why is it so hard to get people to vote? – By Mark E Anderson (dailykos.com) / Sept 17 2017
If you pay attention to world events, you know that voting is an important part of self-governance. How often have we seen the results of an “election” where the ruling dictator received 99 percent or even 100 percent of the vote? Either the results were faked or the votes were coerced under gunpoint. While legitimate voting is crucial to self-governance, our founding fathers were so unsure of giving the vote to everyone that only white males could cast ballots, and even they could not vote for their U.S. senators. That fear of the rabble not being able to correctly elect a president is part of the reason we have the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is not the subject of this post, although volumes can be (and have been) written both for and against the system. This post is meant to examine one question: why can’t we get people to vote? Dictators make a show of it. Even in ridiculous scenarios where there’s 100 percent turnout and they get 100 percent of the vote, they think it gives them legitimacy. So what does it mean when the leader of the free world loses the popular vote, and only 59.7 percent of the voting age population even bothered turning out to vote in the first place?
Adding to that conundrum, we have one party doing everything in its power under the guise of election integrity, to make it harder to vote, thus decreasing voter participation even more. So when did the United States peak in terms of voter participation? You have to go all the way back to the still controversial 1876 presidential election, when Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden but won the Electoral college. That year, 81.8 percent of American voters turned out. The low point in election turnout was in 1996 between Clinton and Dole, at a meager 49 percent. Turnout has picked up a bit since then, but voter turnout in the U.S. has been consistently under 60 percent since 1972.
As much as we would like to blame GOP efforts to reduce turnout, the blame can’t be laid exclusively at their feet. And the statistics mentioned above are for federal elections, which have the highest turnout. Local elections are not even close to getting to 60 percent voter participation.
University of Wisconsin researchers provided Governing with elections data covering 144 larger U.S. cities, depicting a decline in voter turnout in odd-numbered years over the previous decade. In 2001, an average of 26.6 percent of cities’ voting-age population cast ballots, while less than 21 percent did so in 2011. Turnout for primary and general local elections fluctuate from year to year, but long-term trends in many larger cities suggest voter interest has waned.
In the elections that impact us the most, an average of only 26.6 percent of the population votes. That cannot be due to efforts to make voting more difficult. Something has to be causing voter apathy in local elections. The question is: what? Has the disgust with national politicians filtered its way down to the local level?
Maybe it’s the sheer number of elected offices we have to vote for and the number of elections we have to vote in (there are more than 500,000 elected offices in the United States). As an example, the list below details all of the offices I have to vote for in Wisconsin, where I live.
Dane County
County Coroner (recently changed to a hired medical examiner)
Register of Deeds
County Treasurer
County Supervisor (There are 37 board members)
County Executive
County Sheriff
Clerk of Courts
County Clerk
District Attorney
Circuit Court
City of Madison
Common Council (there are 20 alders on the council)
Mayor
Municipal Judge
Madison Metropolitan School District
Seven-seat school board. (I have no idea what seat I am supposed to vote for on the school board as sometimes there are “at large” seats and other times it is based on where you live, yet the board members all have schools assigned to them in specific parts of the city. As far as I can tell, I have to vote for two of them for elementary and middle schools in my area, and seat one for the high school. But seat one also has schools on the other side of town.)
State of Wisconsin
State Assembly
State Senate
Governor
Lieutenant Governor
Attorney General
Secretary of State (a Constitutional office that has had most of its duties stripped away over the years)
State Treasurer (also a Constitutional office that has had most of its duties stripped away over the years)
State Superintendent of public instruction
Supreme Court
Court of Appeals
Federal Government
U.S. House
U.S. Senate
President
Every one of these offices has a primary and general election, and none of the primaries ever seem to be at the same time. Add in incomprehensible referendums, and it’s a wonder we can govern ourselves at all.
Do you have any idea what makes a good register of deeds? Do most people even know that position even exists? Why are we electing sheriffs? Shouldn’t that be a position where you hire the best person you can? We have seen what happens when unqualified boobs end up as sheriffs: look no further than Joe Arpaio or David Clarke. And I still have no idea why I had to vote for a coroner. What makes a good coroner? It’s a mystery.
We elect judges. That has caused issues in Wisconsin, where a once non-partisan race is now partisan in everything but name, and a seat on the state Supreme Court goes to the highest bidder. In my district, I have to vote for 34 different seats/offices. Half the time most of these positions run unopposed, and when there is competition oftentimes you have the barest of ideas of who is running, what their qualifications are, and where they stand on the issues. If you are lucky you will catch a brief write-up of some of the candidates in the local newspaper, but most of the time you end up voting blind.
To someone voting for the first time, the choices can be overwhelming. How can one make an informed choice when the only information out there consists of a couple of candidate websites? Do you pick the one with the better website?
What can we do to fix this?
The first thing we need to do is make it easier, not harder, to vote. No more voter ID laws. When we cannot get more than 21 percent of the population to vote in a local election, do you really think people are out there voting two or three times? We can’t get people to vote even once!
The second solution: enough of multiple elections. I cannot speak on all states, but in Wisconsin we have a spring primary, a spring election, a fall primary, and a fall election. Do we really need four elections in a year? How about we trim this down to one primary, and one general election?
Third: as a society we really need to look at elected offices, and decide if every single one of them is needed. Should some, like judges, be changed to be nominated? Should county sheriffs be hired instead of elected? Do we need to elect a county clerk, register of deeds, treasurer, and clerk of courts? Shouldn’t a county board or county exec hire someone qualified for those positions? Why are common councils and county boards so large? For example, does Dane County really need 36 county board supervisors? Especially when you consider that municipalities take up a good chunk of the county.
A fourth solution: consolidation. Counties and municipalities should consolidate as much as possible to avoid duplication of offices. Do we need both a county board, numerous city councils, and town boards? Do we need multiple school boards in one county?
Solution No. 5: education. We need to instill the importance of voting in our youth—not just in a civics course in high school, but in every grade.
It’s not clear whether any of this would reduce voter apathy. But something has to be done, or someday we too will have leaders who get 100 percent turnout, and receive 100 percent of the vote.
What ideas do you have to increase voter turnout in local elections?
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/9/17/1698384/-Why-is-it-so-hard-to-get-people-to-vote
PB/TK – Yes how do you get more people to vote? Can’t truly blame the younger generations for not showing up and we can’t blame the elder generations for dying off. This past election was just uninspiring with two of the least liked candidates in modern history. Plus top it all off with how personal and/or divided politics are and people don’t want to show up. How many relationships, marriages, families split after Nov 2016? Quite a few. Yet it truly comes down to being spoiled. We have freedoms many do not have, we rub it in others faces so to speak and guarantee when legal immigrants embrace those freedoms, they will show up to vote
