Voting by the numbers
Let's look at some numbers from the 2016 presidential election here in the U.S.
62.984,828 - votes cast for Donald J. Trump
65,853,514 - votes cast for Hillary Clinton
4,489,235 - votes cast for Gary Johnson
1,457,226 - votes cast for Jill Stein
2,340,237 - votes cast for other candidates (including over 118,000 for Bernie Sanders)
137,125,040 - total votes cast in the popular vote
Which of these numbers is the scariest number? The one that isn't listed. 92,565,144. That is an estimate of the number of eligible voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016. Data from the United States Election Project indicates that 59.7% of eligible voters actually took the time to vote. I can't say that they all went to the polls given how many people vote by mail.
That is correct. Over 40% of those who could have influenced all of our lives failed in their obligation to take part in the process. Voter apathy in this nation is among the lowest on the planet in "mature democracies." Why?
L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez looked into the issue recently, posing questions to potential voters about the recent primary election in California. Here are a few of the responses he got.
"No offense but I never vote."
"And why is that?"
"I don't believe in the system."
"Actually, I was thinking about voting. But I didn't do the research and it would probably be better if I didn't vote uninformed."
Back in 2000, PBS' Newshour looked into voter apathy. At the time, voter apathy was very low among the youngest segment of the voting population, 18-24 year-olds. Curtis Gans, who was involved in studying voting at the time, blamed attitude shifts.
Voter apathy among the young seems to be on the decline in the wake of student-activism, motivated mostly by the survivors of school shootings speaking out. That's a good trend.
* * *
I'm sure that on your Facebook pages, your Twitter feeds and so on, people post about how awful things are with our federal government at this moment. About how we need to make a change. About how we need to do something.
That something is voting. At the rate things are going, the biggest event of the Trump Presidency may be obscured by other stuff, like the Russia investigation, the tax cuts enacted and the war on the Affordable Care Act. That event was the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court.
The conservative majority among the nine justices of SCOTUS is eroding our freedoms. The most recent evidence of this is a 5-4 decision in the case HUSTED, OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE v. A. PHILIP RANDOLPH INSTITUTE ET AL.
What is this case about? The National Voting Rights Act prohibits states from removing voters from the rolls solely for failing to cast a vote. The Ohio system was that if a voter failed to vote for two years and then failed to return warning notices and continued not to vote for another four years; they were purged from the rolls. SCOTUS upheld Ohio's process as meeting the requirements of the National Voting Rights Act.
The dissenting justices joined in their dissent. Justice Sotomayor wrote a separate dissent of her own. Here is an except that bears repeating:
"Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters, including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections. The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against."
If we don't get a big chunk of those apathetic voters informed, involved and voting by November, this is just going to get worse. All of the social media posts in the world, including this one, will be for naught without ballots to back them.
62.984,828 - votes cast for Donald J. Trump
65,853,514 - votes cast for Hillary Clinton
4,489,235 - votes cast for Gary Johnson
1,457,226 - votes cast for Jill Stein
2,340,237 - votes cast for other candidates (including over 118,000 for Bernie Sanders)
137,125,040 - total votes cast in the popular vote
Which of these numbers is the scariest number? The one that isn't listed. 92,565,144. That is an estimate of the number of eligible voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016. Data from the United States Election Project indicates that 59.7% of eligible voters actually took the time to vote. I can't say that they all went to the polls given how many people vote by mail.
That is correct. Over 40% of those who could have influenced all of our lives failed in their obligation to take part in the process. Voter apathy in this nation is among the lowest on the planet in "mature democracies." Why?
L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez looked into the issue recently, posing questions to potential voters about the recent primary election in California. Here are a few of the responses he got.
"No offense but I never vote."
"And why is that?"
"I don't believe in the system."
"Actually, I was thinking about voting. But I didn't do the research and it would probably be better if I didn't vote uninformed."
Back in 2000, PBS' Newshour looked into voter apathy. At the time, voter apathy was very low among the youngest segment of the voting population, 18-24 year-olds. Curtis Gans, who was involved in studying voting at the time, blamed attitude shifts.
Voter apathy among the young seems to be on the decline in the wake of student-activism, motivated mostly by the survivors of school shootings speaking out. That's a good trend.
* * *
I'm sure that on your Facebook pages, your Twitter feeds and so on, people post about how awful things are with our federal government at this moment. About how we need to make a change. About how we need to do something.
That something is voting. At the rate things are going, the biggest event of the Trump Presidency may be obscured by other stuff, like the Russia investigation, the tax cuts enacted and the war on the Affordable Care Act. That event was the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court.
The conservative majority among the nine justices of SCOTUS is eroding our freedoms. The most recent evidence of this is a 5-4 decision in the case HUSTED, OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE v. A. PHILIP RANDOLPH INSTITUTE ET AL.
What is this case about? The National Voting Rights Act prohibits states from removing voters from the rolls solely for failing to cast a vote. The Ohio system was that if a voter failed to vote for two years and then failed to return warning notices and continued not to vote for another four years; they were purged from the rolls. SCOTUS upheld Ohio's process as meeting the requirements of the National Voting Rights Act.
The dissenting justices joined in their dissent. Justice Sotomayor wrote a separate dissent of her own. Here is an except that bears repeating:
"Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters, including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections. The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against."
If we don't get a big chunk of those apathetic voters informed, involved and voting by November, this is just going to get worse. All of the social media posts in the world, including this one, will be for naught without ballots to back them.
posted by me at 8:24 AM
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