Christian Caryl
By Christian Caryl
If you’re a Republican, you probably don’t like it when people say nasty things about your candidate. If you’re a Democrat, you get steamed when the other side insults your president or your party.
But there’s one electoral bloc that both parties can vilify at their leisure: those US citizens who refuse to vote. They are routinely derided as stupid, or lazy or hapless.
By now, many Americans have already figured out that there are problems with the way they vote. Start with the fact that some people’s votes count more than others. The presidential vote on November 6 is shaping up to be a pretty tight contest, so it’s entirely possible that the final tally will be close. But, as anyone who’s heard of the electoral college already knows, US presidents aren’t elected on the basis of the popular vote. (Remember Florida in 2000?) So there’s already plenty of editorial anguish over the inherent unfairness of this arrangement.
And then there’s the controversy over registration. Republicans, warning against vote fraud, have introduced laws across the country that raise the bar for voter registration. Critics of these efforts point out that these laws address a kind of fraud that is unlikely to occur, and gloss over the type that is much more threatening (namely, the wholesale manipulation of electronic voting machines). Such critics accuse the Republicans of actually trying to suppress the turnout of groups — minorities, the underprivileged, the elderly — who are more likely to vote for Democrats.
These are all legitimate problems. But what I don’t understand is why no one is addressing the elephant in the room: the fact that some 40 percent of Americans of voting age don’t see any reason to cast their votes on election day at all.
In national election after national election, eligible voters who choose to refrain from voting make up what some political scientists have called a “silent plurality.” There have been moments when that plurality was pretty close to becoming a majority. In 1996, 49.1 percent of the voting age population declined to go to the polls. In 2008, turnout of eligible voters went all the way up to 61.7 percent — the highest since 1968, mind you. But the number of those who refused to vote — or just didn’t care — was still significantly larger than those who voted for Barack Obama, the winning candidate. Non-voters, in short, make up the biggest electoral bloc in the nation.
You’d think this would be the occasion for some soul-searching. After all, how can you claim to have a democracy when your leaders are elected with a mandate from 30-odd percent of the country’s eligible voters? It’s estimated that some 90 million Americans will abstain from voting next month. You’d think that this would prompt us to ask some fundamental questions about the viability of a system that’s supposedly based on popular participation but actually prompts rejection on a mass scale. (Participation is even lower for midterm congressional elections — only 39 percent of the voting age population showed up in 2010, for example — and lower still for elections on the state and city levels.) Most of the articles on this subject lately view it through the predictable lens of how these abstainers would affect the election if they actually chose to vote. (The consensus seems to be that most of them lean Democratic, presumably because non-voters do tend to be poorer and less well-educated and thus more inclined to vote for liberal policies.) But perhaps reporters are asking the wrong questions.
Withholding one’s vote in a presidential election is, in fact, an entirely rational response to the existing political order in the United States. The electoral college is a big part of the problem, of course. If you live in persistently Republican Texas, you have very good reasons to doubt that your vote for Obama will really influence the outcome. If you live in solidly liberal Massachusetts, casting a vote for Mitt Romney as president is likely to have little effect. (And don’t get me started on voting in Washington, DC.)
As a result, pundits and prognosticators say that there are only nine states that really matter in this year’s presidential election: the so-called “battleground” states where the outcome is still uncertain enough to warrant attention from the candidates. As the Associated Press pointed out, modern campaigns now have the data to target voters even more narrowly than that, and they’re now focusing on just 106 “swing counties” (out of 3,143 in the United States).
The reason, of course, is the winner-take-all system of the electoral college, which dictates that whoever wins a majority of the votes in a state gets all of that state’s electors. In fact, the winner-take-all (or first-past-the-post) principle pervades American politics.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Christian Caryl
If you’re a Republican, you probably don’t like it when people say nasty things about your candidate. If you’re a Democrat, you get steamed when the other side insults your president or your party.
But there’s one electoral bloc that both parties can vilify at their leisure: those US citizens who refuse to vote. They are routinely derided as stupid, or lazy or hapless.
By now, many Americans have already figured out that there are problems with the way they vote. Start with the fact that some people’s votes count more than others. The presidential vote on November 6 is shaping up to be a pretty tight contest, so it’s entirely possible that the final tally will be close. But, as anyone who’s heard of the electoral college already knows, US presidents aren’t elected on the basis of the popular vote. (Remember Florida in 2000?) So there’s already plenty of editorial anguish over the inherent unfairness of this arrangement.
And then there’s the controversy over registration. Republicans, warning against vote fraud, have introduced laws across the country that raise the bar for voter registration. Critics of these efforts point out that these laws address a kind of fraud that is unlikely to occur, and gloss over the type that is much more threatening (namely, the wholesale manipulation of electronic voting machines). Such critics accuse the Republicans of actually trying to suppress the turnout of groups — minorities, the underprivileged, the elderly — who are more likely to vote for Democrats.
These are all legitimate problems. But what I don’t understand is why no one is addressing the elephant in the room: the fact that some 40 percent of Americans of voting age don’t see any reason to cast their votes on election day at all.
In national election after national election, eligible voters who choose to refrain from voting make up what some political scientists have called a “silent plurality.” There have been moments when that plurality was pretty close to becoming a majority. In 1996, 49.1 percent of the voting age population declined to go to the polls. In 2008, turnout of eligible voters went all the way up to 61.7 percent — the highest since 1968, mind you. But the number of those who refused to vote — or just didn’t care — was still significantly larger than those who voted for Barack Obama, the winning candidate. Non-voters, in short, make up the biggest electoral bloc in the nation.
You’d think this would be the occasion for some soul-searching. After all, how can you claim to have a democracy when your leaders are elected with a mandate from 30-odd percent of the country’s eligible voters? It’s estimated that some 90 million Americans will abstain from voting next month. You’d think that this would prompt us to ask some fundamental questions about the viability of a system that’s supposedly based on popular participation but actually prompts rejection on a mass scale. (Participation is even lower for midterm congressional elections — only 39 percent of the voting age population showed up in 2010, for example — and lower still for elections on the state and city levels.) Most of the articles on this subject lately view it through the predictable lens of how these abstainers would affect the election if they actually chose to vote. (The consensus seems to be that most of them lean Democratic, presumably because non-voters do tend to be poorer and less well-educated and thus more inclined to vote for liberal policies.) But perhaps reporters are asking the wrong questions.
Withholding one’s vote in a presidential election is, in fact, an entirely rational response to the existing political order in the United States. The electoral college is a big part of the problem, of course. If you live in persistently Republican Texas, you have very good reasons to doubt that your vote for Obama will really influence the outcome. If you live in solidly liberal Massachusetts, casting a vote for Mitt Romney as president is likely to have little effect. (And don’t get me started on voting in Washington, DC.)
As a result, pundits and prognosticators say that there are only nine states that really matter in this year’s presidential election: the so-called “battleground” states where the outcome is still uncertain enough to warrant attention from the candidates. As the Associated Press pointed out, modern campaigns now have the data to target voters even more narrowly than that, and they’re now focusing on just 106 “swing counties” (out of 3,143 in the United States).
The reason, of course, is the winner-take-all system of the electoral college, which dictates that whoever wins a majority of the votes in a state gets all of that state’s electors. In fact, the winner-take-all (or first-past-the-post) principle pervades American politics.
WP-BLOOMBERG
