It is a 4-year ritual. No, I’m not referring to tomorrow’s election, but the observation that always happens around this time. 1/3 of Americans feel absolutely no need to participate in elections:
Back in the 2008 election, 131 million Americans cast a ballot for president. That’s about two-thirds of eligible voters, which seems like a lot. Yet that still left more than 15 million people who were registered but didn’t vote. An additional 30 million Americans weren’t even registered. Why is that?
Here is the chart posted by Brad Plumer. And really, you look at the chart and there is no doubt as to the reason: at lest 1/3 of voters are simply not interested:
And here (as usual) are the proposals for increasing participation.
Over the years, experts have tried to come up with a number of proposals that might increase turnout. We could make Election Day a national holiday rather than holding it on a Tuesday. We could allow Americans to vote by email. We could make voting mandatory. And so forth. But few of these ideas have caught on yet. As a result, the United States still ranks incredibly low among advanced countries in terms of voter turnout.
These election “experts” are idiotic. If apathy is the problem, then making voting more convenient won’t improve turn-out.
Indeed, the US does rank behind most Democracies for voter turn-out. It’s because of the bad choices, or more precisely, lack of choice on the ballot. Every other advanced democracy has true multi-party elections, where even the minor parties get participation in the government. The US, on the other hand, is a winner-take-all system that offers voters only two boring candidates.
It is true that having voting on a workday suppresses turnout, but you’re also right that the other problems with the system are the major problem.
We need party-proportional representation for legislatures (I don’t care whether it’s Single Transferrable Vote or Party List or Reweighted Range Voting). And we need approval voting or range voting for single-winner elections. But of course few have even *heard* of these things in the US. Even where people know about them, the entrenched interests really hate them, as we’ve seen in the UK. I don’t think we’ll see this sort of reform until afer a revolution.