What Did the Voters Really Say?

With all the turmoil and chaos we have been living with for the last four years, most of our fellow Americans are exhausted emotionally.  With all the anxiety and fear that we have been subjected to in 2020 by the Coronavirus, it is hard to imagine a reason for any American not to have an opinion about the election of our President.  That said, our election turnout looks like it will end up somewhere in the mid 60% range.

If you will permit me the luxury of generalizing, only about two thirds of those who were eligible to vote actually voted.  Now think about the fact that a majority of that number is probably going to demonstrate that around four in ten voters determined the outcome of our Presidential Elections.  Four in ten!  Wasn’t President Trump controversial enough?  And, how do we interpret the reelection of Republican Senators and Representatives when the voters sent President Trump packing?

The talking heads are busy trying to slice and dice any little snippet of data out of the numbers to give us a statistically interesting picture of what happened and why, but the most obvious and relevant statistic is not to be found in the demographics of those who voted.  No, the demographic that is most relevant and the one that is hardest to find, is why didn’t more voters vote?  Why did one third of the voters decide not to participate?  The Presidential Election with the greatest voter turnout ever was the election of 1876 when the turnout exceeded 80%.  Even with 80% turnout, we still had one in five voters who chose not to participate.  We, the voters, are certainly letting our Founding Fathers down.

We have what is known as a Republican-democracy.  We use democratic processes to select an agent to represent our interests in governmental proceedings.  Each of our selections is decided on the basis of majority approval, but when a significant part 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 and that is a sad commentary on our Election process.

There are many possible reasons from apathy on one end of the spectrum to frustration on the other end and we really can’t say anything definitive about those possibilities unless we spend some time and effort to gather data from that population of eligible voters.  There will be some academic efforts to fill in the information, but we probably won’t hear much about them because the outcome will be old news in just a few more days.

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 non-participation of voters to be a design flaw.  That said, our forefathers would be frustrated and amazed by the number of voters who just don’t vote in our elections.

As eligible voters, we have allowed our system of government to be hijacked by organizations and people who are simply trying to buy power and our politicians are for sale to the highest bidder.  At the end of the day we are the ones who are facilitating our own displeasure and creating the atmosphere of dysfunction that leads to our disgust.  When we demand that our candidates shun the non-constituent dollars and work only for those who actually have a vote in their election, we will be stepping out into the sunlight of a profoundly new day for America.

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