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  • I have sympathy for non-voters in the US. Not so much out of principle but because of how it is done. Voting takes place on a Tuesday. That's because in ye olden days you had to allow people to attend church on Sunday before making the trip on horseback to participate in the election. That's a cute tradition but clashes with the way the economy works today. People are very dependent on their low-wage jobs that they can be fired from easily. If you're working two of those jobs to make ends meet, you may not have the "luxury" to skip work to go and vote on a normal weekday. That luxury often includes having to fill in a booklet of stuff that's on the ballot. You're not just voting on a president, a senator, or a congressperson. You may be asked your option on a plebiscite, a judge, a sheriff, a school board, etc. It is overinflated in my view and explains long slow moving lines at ballot stations that you don't often see elsewhere. And that's after a possibly Kafkaesque registration process to be eligible in the first place or to get mail-ins in some states. It is almost designed to keep people away. Maybe you're taking these structural problems as something "politicians cling to."

    Make election day a public holiday that forces businesses who are open anyway to allow all their employees to go and vote.

  • Because that would require a lot of work, and 99.99% of politicians are in it for the power and money. Not to actually help their constituents.

    • I guess that's fair and they know they're never going to be able to make good on the promises they make so those voters will only become entrenched and disaffected.

  • Most non-voters don't hold significantly different beliefs than the voting population. In non-competitive states, it means motivating them to vote is unlikely to tip the scales. Why bother tipping the results from 60% to 55% by spending millions on it? Better to allocate those funds to a 53% to 48% potential flip.

    In battleground states they do try to reach these people.

    • I don't think that your assumptions are true. Non-voters tend to be more progressive than voters, because conservatives vote religiously out of a sense of duty and responsibility, and progressives vote when they feel like it.

      This is a lever that moves in two directions. Voter suppression is a very real thing that happens in every American election. It's practiced by conservative candidates for exactly the asymmetry I mention above.

      • I mean, non-voters aren't much more progressive really. They're more likely to be independents (in the US at least). See:

        They do skew a bit more D, but not massively so. They're also largely non-white, less well educated and poorer. It's a bit of a toss-up whether any of those demographics skew R or D.

        I don't really see much evidence that they're more progressive, more centrist at best really. Although I suppose if you flatten political beliefs on a 1-dimensional axis, that does mean more progressive on average.

        Do note that this differs per state, and voter turnout is also correlated with general results skewing harder in a certain direction. Complexities all around!

  • Because every time is someone's first time, and due to voter registration being necessary a zillion years before the actual vote, no one specifies that and runs "VOTE ON NOV NTH " ads a week before the election day.

  • As others have said, this seems like an ill-formed question. Do you have reason to believe that politicians "cling to the idea that these voters can't be reached"?

54 comments