In many states it is near impossible to vote unless you are unemployed or retired due to long lines, terrible hours, and voting locations. It makes me happy to live in a mail-in ballot state where I get my ballot weeks before election day, I have plenty of time to research everyone on the ballot (including judges) and make the best choice available. That's Colorado for you, but we are not alone in that.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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And that's a big reason why Republicans are criticizing mail in ballots. If it became that easy to vote, then many more people would vote and they would have a harder time winning elections.
So Republicans will still claim mail in ballots are full of fraud despite there being no evidence of any voter fraud on a significant scale. (Definitely nothing that would sway a federal or state level election. Likely not even enough to sway a local election.)
PA mail-in ballot represent!
If the elections were on a weekend, like Saturday or Sunday then I turn out would be greater. But the puritans evangelists say that Sunday is for their imaginary little man living in the skies 🙄
Ooo we should make it a national holiday! Have public transportation for everyone to get there and fully support mail in voting across the country.
When would the bus drivers vote, then? Just do away with voting day and have a voting week instead.
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Considering the state of the US, it’s really amazing more people don’t vote.
Isn't the problem that there's only two options? Here in Norway we have 10 different parties that are all quite popular. To me having only two options seems only marginally better than 1.
Yes. They have FPTP elections everywhere from top to bottom. Even state houses and senates are divided in blue and red because of this, WTF. They could really do with an electoral system update.
Yes, but the problem is deeper than that because one party is demonstrably worse than the other. Dems are still too conservative, Republicans are literally tearing the country apart.
I always use this analogy when people say "but the Democrats aren't giving me everything I want:
You're on 8th Street and want to get to 1st Street. In front of you are two cabs. The Democrat cab will only take you to 3rd Street. Close, but not really your destination. The Republican cab will take you to 16th Street before locking you in the cab and setting it on fire with you inside.
By the way, not choosing in this analogy isn't an option. If you don't choose (don't vote), then a cab is chosen for you.
So is the Democratic cab perfect? Of course not. However, it's a lot easier to recover from being dropped off at 3rd Street than it is being set on fire all the way over on 16th Street.
Well the problem is we don't have ranked choice voting in most all places. So if you're not voting for red or blue you are kinda wasting your vote.
Really is frustrating with the amount of apathy going around, it only hurts ourselves
It might not be apathy; it could be the fact that for presidential elections, a vast amount of votes simply don't matter, and that fact bleeds into other elections, where their votes would matter.
What I mean when I say that the votes don't matter is that if a person is right-leaning in a solid blue state or vice versa, they can be reasonably sure that their vote is meaningless, because we let land masses vote for president, instead of people. Of course, this doesn't apply for local elections, but I think it's pretty plausible that this depresses turnout in them, anyway.
There should be a lot more engagement for an updated representative system. Nudge nudge from Europe. I recommend representative voting.
I recommend representative voting.
Do you mind elaborating on this? Do you mean Proportional Representation?
Yes, that's the accurate name! I'm not sure I would call FPTP representative given how alternative votes are lost. Like if I'm a socdem in a red district my vote is void, since the FPTP only have one seat. In a proportional system there are bigger districts with more seats so that lesser groups can get their votes distributed onto a seat.
Like instead of NY State being 102 Dem & 48 GOP, it would be 70 Dem, 10 Socdem, 10 Greens, 20 GOP, 10 Trump, 10 Libertarian etc.
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“Voters who were more favorable to Republican candidates turned out at higher rates compared with those who typically support Democrats,” the report’s authors write. “Shifting preferences among individual voters – though likely consequential in some races – was a much smaller factor in the 2022 midterms compared with turnout.”
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Lauren Boebert, the hated representative from Colorado won reelection by just a few hundred votes. This in a state that has mail-in ballots.
A few hundred more people had to vote and we never would have heard from that nutcase again, and yet people couldn't be motivated enough to do it. They wouldn't even have had to drive anywhere to do it. Literally a few seconds of their time and she would have been gone. Nope. People were just too goddamn lazy to do it. And yet those same people would be the first to complain about her winning.
The vast majority of our problems in the US are homegrown and are a result of apathy and laziness. We live in a participatory democracy and that system only works when people actually participate in the process.
I don't think it had to do with laziness in most cases. It's simply become a "damned if I do, damned if I don't" situation. Voter apathy is huge.
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I really don't understand how the extreme emotions involved with politics in our society can result in apparent apathy. Their are conservatives who are willing to kill people over their political differences, but they still don't vote. Progressives get angry about hate-filled legislation and our steady loss of civil rights but won't spend a few hours to vote the people doing it out of office.
Most races are now decided by tiny percentages. Either party has the potential to suddenly take over the government by an overwhelming majority. Convincing less than a tenth of the people who don't vote to show up would do it!
Is saving the country from chaos really not worth a few hours?
Remember that Republicans have also deliberately done their best to make it much more difficult to vote for a lot of people, as well as opposed any measures which would make it easier to vote.
Standing in line for 11 hours on a workday without access to water would deter most, and that works as designed.
Which means if everyone who didn't vote instead voted for SpongeBob, he would have handily taken the election
In other words, third party candidates could win, ending the dictatorship of the winner that's the automatic result in a democracy with only two options (or a stalemate where nothing gets done if two government bodies are controlled by opposing parties.)
Couldn't vote in the last primary because I was registered as an independent. Not making that mistake again
My ballot never came in the midterms...
You may have to request it each time, and requests may be rejected without notice. So you might have to appeal.
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