Good Morning.
We have a miserable voting history in this country, even though the outcomes of elections can affect the economy, the quality of health care, and whether we go to war and lose thousands of people. Insignificant stuff like that. During presidential years, the percentage goes up, but for local elections like city council or the school board, a twenty percent turnout is considered pretty good. It's pathetic.
Old folks vote because they have time on their hands and are constantly worried about somebody messing with issues that concern their age group, like Medicare and Social Security. Young people don't vote unless an issue really affects them, like getting a break on their student loans. At the moment a lot of them are worried about gun violence so we'll see if that translates into larger numbers of them casting a ballot. Minorities often think their voice doesn't matter or they're intimidated by the registration process; in certain parts of the country, there are efforts to actually discourage them from voting. Working people apparently have trouble fitting in a trip to the polls because of job schedules and day care arrangements. There's something called the absentee ballot, but a lot of people don't plan that far ahead.
People tend to vote if they're angry. The candidate who proposes better drinking water or campaign finance reform will not generate the kind of reaction as the guy who wants to exclude people with pre-existing conditions or build a wall. Or not build a wall. Or get tougher gun laws. Or leave them loosey goosey. Negative campaign ads work for the same reason as the darker stances taken by the people running for office. It's all well and good to show the candidate romping with his or her kids and dishing up spaghetti at a soup kitchen, but people sit up and take notice when someone says his or her opponent took half a mil from the pharmaceutical industry, once burned the flag during a protest march, or had a problem with shoplifting in college. Trying to disprove any of it is usually futile. The seed has been planted. The lies are out there. Some voters genuinely care about issues of character but many do not. They vote for whoever tells them what they want to hear or they automatically vote for an R or a D after a name.
There are things we could do. Oregon voters are sent a ballot, fill it out, and slip it through a slot into special receptacles on the street. They can also mail it in. This isn't a bad thought; for one thing, nobody can hack into a piece of paper sitting on your dining room table, but there are complaints about slow postal service resulting in ballots being counted late. In the past week I've heard several people, including a couple of high schoolers, say that the way to solve the lousy voting percentage is to make Election Day a holiday. By doing so, the lazy out there would, perhaps, acquire the mental association that you vote on that particular day just like you hand out candy on Halloween and cook up a turkey on Thanksgiving. The problem is that you can't have holidays for all the national, state, and local elections. Others say we need to start up the high school civics classes with teachers who pounded it into bored students that voting was as important as breathing. Another suggestion is to have elections on the weekend and forget this Tuesday business. That seems to work, as far as numbers are concerned at least, in other countries where voters, often just props in dictatorships, must look at us and wonder where we left our brains.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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