c/dataishorrifyinganddepressing
Seriously! I had no idea so few people voted.
If it makes you feel any better, the trend looks like more people are voting as time goes on.
As crazy as it is, Donald Trump appears to have been the single largest motivator to vote in American history. Either him or Covid.
He has definitely motivated me to vote twice, and for the rest of my life I won’t miss an election. Seriously. I had voted before, but I’d sit it out if I was too busy or I didn’t particularly like either candidate.
I have happily voted for Mr. or Ms. Not Trump twice. Now I also have to vote for Mr or Ms Not Influenced by Trump every chance I get too.
Very sad indeed, I will try my hardest to recuperate the DNV score.
I would also like to see a similar graph for mid-term elections. Do the winners even get 10% of the eligible votes?
The government should partner with McDonald’s and offer a free double cheeseburger with proof of voting.
Election Day should be a national holiday to give folks a chance to vote.
I mean, at least put it on the weekend, like other countries (or at least mine).
Allow early in-person voting centres and postal votes. Make it convenient.
Though, maybe these are only widespread in mandatory voting counties (like mine), because you'd get massive complaints if it wasn't convenient.
Turnout is unsurprisingly, very high here.
The government should pass a law that it's required to vote, or give a reasonable explanation why you can't. Employers are punished for keeping their employees from voting.
Hi, it's me, Australia, you might remember me from such democratic innovations as the secret ballot and mandatory voting, America will never have mandatory voting because it works about as well as gun control, single payer health care, and the metric system.
Also many places have mandatory voting but very few enforce it, I would put money on America being one of those places if it somehow got a foothold.
Its actually illegal to do this. Yes, that's stupid.
It should be whiskey like the founders intended
That is.
It reminds me of a time I got arrested for giving a nice old lady a bottle of water while she was waiting in line to vote in Georgia and it became a big deal. I got charged, convicted and sentenced to prison time but luckily my friend Jerry Seinfeld springs Larry out of jail after he discovers a juror broke his sequester, causing a mistrial and the sentence being thrown out.
How about a $200 tax receipt from the government itself?
If they gave out monopoly pieces and gave away $1m they would have the entire working poor who don't vote participate.
Didn't Krispy Kreme offer a free donut to anyone with an I voted sticker at one point?
The percentages for 2016 only add up to 97, and the 40% bar is longer than the 41% of 2012.
Maybe a really dumb question and I'm not from the US but why did Hilary lose in 2016 when she had more votes than Donald Trump? That doesn't really make any sense to me
Because we have this stupid thing called the electoral college. Basically, each state has a certain number of votes, based (roughly) on population (its a whole other issue), and the states' votes are cast for whoever won the most votes within their state (barring rogue electors and the few states that use proportional representation for votes.) Theres a total of 538 votes, and all that matters is winning more than half of them. This has made the winner of the popular vote lose the election 5 times (though in 1824, it went to the house of representatives for a final decision because no one had a majority.)
To summarize: not a dumb question, VERY dumb answer.
Also to clarify further, the founding fathers created the EC specifically to override the popular vote, because they were afraid that land owning men might be too poorly educated to actually make decisions about our "democracy."
Really let that sink in. They probably would have opposed the expansion of voting rights to anybody.
Because in the US democracy every vote is equal, but some are more equal than others.
We were supposed to be a representative democracy with one rep for every 33,000 Americans. When voting for president each state gets one vote per rep and one for each of their two senators.
A while back some assholes decided that 33,000 is too representative and we should have a fixed number instead. So now it turns out that Wyoming should get one rep for every 58,000 Americans so their votes are worth far more than a Californian's.
People don’t vote, states vote. Semi proportionally to number of people, but it isn’t linear. This means that California gets 50 some odd votes and they all go to the democrats most of the time but Wyoming gets 3 (the minimum) despite it being smaller than many cities in population and they all go to the republicans basically every time. That’s why swing states are a thing that exists and matters. Back in the 00s Florida and Ohio were in the sweet spot of big and could go either way (insert joke about my girlfriend) but now they’re both considered firmly Republican states, meanwhile Wisconsin lost its Republican status and now swings as did Arizona. When people talk about texas possibly becoming a swing state as a big deal this is why, it doesn’t matter who gets the popular vote, texas is so big and serves as a counterweight to California and New York for the republicans that if the democrats win Texas without the republicans picking up several states that they never get, all of the swing states, or one of the two big hitters of the Dems then there’s basically no chance for them to win.
I've never understood why there is a voting system where the one with most votes can lose.
They usually justify it by saying it's to prevent the tyranny of the majority (two wolves and a sheep biting on dinner).
But a case could be made that it's a way to keep the elite entrenched.
The founders were a gentleman's club. Which is basically a fraternity. They made up rules that made sense to a bunch of frat boy farmers with enlightenment libraries.
It was a compromise so the smaller states were willing to join the United States. Same reason there are two senators for each state.
Also worth noting: Republicans have only once won the popular vote since the turn of this century, in 2004 for George W. Bush's reelection, when he had both the incumbent advantage and was still riding the post-9/11 patriotism wave
or put another way, the democratic candidate have won the popular vote on 5/6 presidential elections this century
It's funny because here being incumbent usually is a disadvantage because you get blamed by all the crap that's happening, even the little that isn't their fault.
The median voter is woefully uninformed and largely votes on vibes and name recognition. Many fail to understand exactly what kind of power the president actually holds.
Personally I blame this in part on the death of journalism. Local newspapers keep going out of business which removes any accountability for local authorities, and the only way you know of anything happening is based on Facebook gossip dripping in all of the biases the individuals who are there when something happens. And the local news that still exists keeps getting bought up by larger entities that may or may not be politically motivated to try to sway opinions and set the conversation across the country. Or worse in some cases independent news outlets are simply threatened into not investigating or reporting on certain topics
Also the two prior as well. So 7/8
Only a 7% increase after that nightmare.
7% is enough to swing any election in history (the part of it that is shown on the chart)
I think even more horrifying is that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016
That orange party sure does win a lot of elections.
It's the Voter Apathy Party.
Should split this out by electoral college votes/states where the 'did not vote' could actually have made a difference. This is great info but also a bit misleading cause votes in swing states have more of an effect than increasing votes in deeply blue or deeply red states. The US president is not selected by a national popular vote. See on the chart how W Bush won the election but Gore had the popular vote, due to how the electoral college works.
Not discounting that more people should vote. I wish there were a national holiday in the US for everyone to get out and vote. But some votes matter more than others, depending on where you live, and this chart misses that nuance.
There is a map like that out there, if I remember correctly like 40+ states had “did not vote” win…
W Bush didn't win the election due to how the electoral college works, he won it due to the corrupt supreme court. Not only did he lose the popular vote, he lost the EC as well.
Yeah, and some of the biggest states (like California) solidly go for one party. So, the non-voters really don't affect the presidential race there.
Pretty much. My domicile is in one of the polarized States & the mail-in ballot costs $15 to send. It would be a waste of my money to send a ballot & since I don’t live there I have moral issues voting in elections for places I am out of touch with—leaving just federal content of the ballot.
This makes me kinda ill. Like I almost cried a bit looking over these numbers. And I’ve seen some shit.
There should be a tax incentive for voting or something
Step 1: make voting compulsory
Step 2: move it to a weekend
Step 3: easy access to prepoll or postal voting for people who can't make it on the official day
Bonus step: change voting system to IRV, or even better, to something proportional like MMP or STV
There you go. America has a functioning electoral system.
Step 2 is out it is in most countries in Europe. But honestly I like how it is in the UK. You vote on a Thursday and people have legally mandated time off during that day to go vote.
I feel like a lot of people would definitely vote if it gave them paid time off from their work.
If you move to a weekend then it comes off their free time and they might be away etc
Also free and no hurdles mail voting.
Or do it the other way around, the amount of money that the government can spend is limited by voter turnout.
Clearly if you can't get people excited enough to vote for your policies, you don't have a mandate.
Tankies think that's already how the US electoral system works. They think voting for Biden made more bombs fall on Gaza
Quick reminder: In Switzerland, we have the ability to vote on everything. We get educated like that from the early childhood on, that voting is important and necessary. Even with that concept, the average voter participation is between 40-50%. So even if you might think a lot of people are not voting - yes, true, but you will never be able to increase it much above 50% IMHO.
Australia has mandatory voting which is an interesting one. Quick search tells me the last turnout was nearly 90%.
It's mandatory voting in Australia, but you just need to turn up and mark your name off the list and you won't get hassled to vote. But I guess, once you're there....might as well vote.
And the fine for not voting is $50 or so, and the electoral commission will take most reasonable excuses and waive the fine if you don't make it.
So it's more like a, "come on guys, do your civic duty" kind of thing as opposed to MANDATORY, and 90-something percent of the voting population in Australia just rolls with it.
Bonus: At most polling places you can usually get a "democracy sausage" for a small donation to a local cause, so most people will wander in just for that.
Edit: voting is on a Saturday, so most people don't have to take time from work to vote. There are legislative provisions that say that employers have to allow people time to vote if they work Saturdays, and polling stations are open from 8am to 6pm, which generally allows a window of opportunity for most people to vote without disrupting their day too much.
There are also postal votes of course, which can be ordered via phone/letter/internet and sent to your address. You can fill them in and send them back early, so there's no real reason to not vote.
There should be a No Vote tax, make it just $1–10 or something small. If you vote, you don’t pay it. Use the money to help pay for administering the elections (wouldn’t cover everything, but it’d help).
Should we fix the system so that people both want to and can vote for candidates they want?
No, that wouldn't be American. Make something punitive that can be disproportionately leveraged against the poor and marginalized community neighborhoods.
That sounds like unnecessarily punishing low income people, in my opinion it would be better to give the 10$ to those who vote.
Or do the opposite. Voting enters you into a lottery where the prize is you never have to pay taxes again.
In Australia it's $20. https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/non-voters.htm
How many are illegible due to prior convictions?
The chart says it's only looking at eligible voters
But looking it up shows around 4.6 million were disenfranchised in 2022 because of convictions. In semi-good news, it's gone down recently in part because more states are starting to allow people to vote after they've served time. So if people keep pushing in other states, it can hopefully keep going that way
We really need to have a compulsive voting law where the fine is like $1000 dollars. To make it easier though voters should get a federal holiday for elections, a choice of mail in voting, and be rewarded with $50 dollars for doing it. For all of you people who hate the idea of being compelled to vote, jury duty is mandatory but you get a small stipend for your time (at least in CA) and it's necessary to keep a functioning government.
Now if only we can get rid of the electoral college and implement ranked choice voting...
I've always been of the opinion that if you don't vote, I don't want to hear a word complaining about politics, but I've really reached my breaking point with that bullshit. We've seen it over and over again how ambivalence leads to things getting worse for a lot of people (often including the ambivalent ones). At this point, I'm just cutting people off immediately when they start up and I know they chose not to vote. Shut the fuck up. If it wasn't important enough to go to the ballot box, it's not important enough for me to listen.
Biden's party did not win the house. There should be no star for 2020,.
Dems won the house in 2020. They lost it in 2022 midterms. Biden deserves the star.
