When Scotland voted on the independence question they set a record for
turnout, 84.5 percent of the population voted. Can you imagine an American election where 84.5 percent of the voting age public voted? We would not have enough polling places, ballots, or poll volunteers.
The sad fact is that in our republic, voting is about as popular as getting a root canal. In presidential elections we are lucky to get over 55 percent of the voting aged population to vote. During mid-term elections, less than 40 percent of eligible Americans vote. The news only gets worse for local elections for offices like mayor, school board, and city council. It is estimated that local elections average less than half the turnout of national elections (pdf).
If you were to listen to our Republican friends, neighbors, relatives, and talk radio blowhards, you'd think that the biggest problem facing American elections today is that people are running around pretending to be someone else and voting multiple times. Looking at the statistics for voting in our country, it's pretty obvious that voter fraud is the least of our problems when it comes to voting. We cannot even get people to vote once—and the Republicans are worried out people voting twice?
Follow below the fold for more.
Does voter fraud occur? Yes. However, as a Department of Justice study shows:
Out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for voter fraud .... Only 26 of those cases, or about .00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.
Voter ID, or as fellow Kossack akadjian calls them,
Republican-issued IDs are a solution to a problem that simply does not exist. Instead of focusing efforts on making it harder to vote, our legislators should be working to make it easier to register to vote, and easier to vote. Not only should voting be made simpler, we need to make it easier to run for office—you should not have to be a millionaire to run for Congress.
It is understandable why people don't vote. They are cynical, seeing the same old politicians doing the same old crap, voting for corporations and for money instead of for people and doing what is right. Money has become a cancer in our electoral system. My pie in the sky dream is that elections—all elections—are publicly funded with no outside donations. This would put everyone on a level playing field and would go a long way towards reducing cynicism about our government.
While my pipe dream of publicly funded elections will probably never come to fruition, there are things that we can do to get more people to the polls.
First, either make Election Day a holiday or move elections to a weekend.
In fact, there's an entire organization that proposes moving elections to weekends:
Why Tuesday?, a national non-profit working to increase voting rates by moving elections to weekends, bemoans that the Unites States ranks dead last in voter participation among G8 nations. The organization notes that a 2010 poll showed nearly one-third of non-voters said the reason they didn't cast ballots was they couldn't get time off from work to vote.
Second, make registration easier. With the amount of information the government has on every person by the time they turn 18, there is no reason that they cannot
automatically register you to vote. When I was 18 and serving in the Army in Germany, I got a letter from Selective Service that I needed to register with them. If Selective Service could find me in Germany, while I was already in the Army in 1986, then there is no reason that our government cannot register young men and women to vote when they turn 18 (and yes, I do see the irony of having to register for the draft while I was in the Army).
Third, make the polls a party. Make it the center of the community with food and entertainment. Make it a time and place to get to know your neighbors. Use elections as a time to build community.
Our election turnout ranks 138 out of 172 countries. We are supposed to the the guiding light of the free world, yet our citizens cannot be bothered to get out and vote. We should be embarrassed by the voter turnout in this country. It has been said that Congress is broken. I agree with that sentiment; however, in order to fix Congress, we must first fix our elections.