According to an Associated Press article out of Seattle, the voter turnout for the November elections in Washington State is going to be just over 44%. Let that sink in for a moment.
Less than half of the registered voters voted. That means that even if a candidate or ballot issue got 100% of the vote, and none did, we still couldn’t say the majority of our citizens approved.
We have what is known as a Republican-democracy. We use democratic processes to select an agent to represent our interests in governmental proceedings. We actually select several agents because there are several jurisdictions that oversee different aspects or our daily lives – City, County, State, and Federal governments. Each of our selections is decided on the basis of majority approval, but when a majority of the people who were eligible to vote chose not to vote I’m of the opinion that the only clear message was that the voters just didn’t care.
When a majority of the voters don’t vote, should we even consider the election to be valid? We don’t do that, but maybe we should.
In primary elections, the voter turnout is typically low so if you want to knock a candidate out of the general election the primary is a
good place to do it. This is how ideologues like the TEA Party manage to win some of their elections – they put forward their candidate in the primary election and then turn out voters who share their idealistic interests to kick the other candidates out of the general election. Of course, these tactics only work if most of the voters don’t vote so the complacent voters are playing right into their hands.
In my book, A Broken Sausage Grinder; Is Our Government Fundamentally Flawed?, I wrote: “Everybody proclaims disgust with the political system, yet the system continues to get more disgusting. Is the hard-nosed partisanship in politics today the result of a flaw in the design of our system of government? Did our forefathers overlook something important when they were writing the Constitution?” I don’t consider voter apathy to be a design flaw because it is not something that can be measured and if we can’t measure it we can’t design for it. That said, our forefathers would be frustrated and amazed by the number of voters who just don’t care about their government.
I end every blog post with the following statement – The Sausage Grinder is Broken, will you help to fix it? Here is one clear way to participate in the fix. VOTE!
The Sausage Grinder is Broken – will you help to fix it?
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