I’ll tell you why I didn’t used to vote. I worked too many hours and was emotionally exhausted all of the time. I didn’t have hobbies or interests or energy to do anything else. My personal life was a complete mess. I didn’t have friends or relationships either. I ate poorly and didn’t exercise. All I literally did was work. I suspect a lot of people were in my shoes.
The bullshit requirement for the vote to be on a Tuesday.
Vote should be on a weekend.
It should be national election week, not election day
I’m a waiter, that one Saturday could be 25% of my monthly income. It should be a national holiday
My state allows for mail in voting. My problem was that I was always stuck in survival mode. I couldn’t take care of my basic needs, there was no room for civic duties. It’s like I was in a trance. The problem is having to work too many hours, plus commute.
Trump: Yeah, we need more proof, come in to vote, bring two live references with an additional reference to vouge for them, all with passports, birth certificates and I need the number of the closest living relative to the doctor that delivered you.
and no lamination!
Because that group likely thinks both options are terrible and think it’s a pointless waste of time
Ultimately proven correct
Self fulfilling prophecy.
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.
A lot of those low-wage workers don’t get federal holidays off. Ever go to a liquor store on Independence Day? Or a restaurant on Veterans Day? Or fill up your gas tank on Washington’s Birthday?
A better system is universal early and mail-in voting with as few impediments as possible. If you need to require identification, that ID needs to be free. There should be no monetary barriers to voting.
I don’t mind your suggestion. I think universal mail-ins are a good idea. At the same time, I have an inkling that you didn’t read my comment all the way to the end.
I guess not! The hazards of splitting attention between reading Lemmy any other things in life
For BeefPiano@lemmy.world ; I think the key words are “that force businesses who are open anyway”
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a public holiday but some other law that forces (half) a day off on that day.
Being as they don’t vote, they are technically not voters.
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”?
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 on the promised they make so those voters will only become entrenched and disaffected.
Because one party doesn’t want them to vote and voter supression campaigns have become extremely powerful. And it goes beyond the beurocratic tactics like voter IDs. Apathy, cynicism, and distrust are also part of the right-wing propaganda. Opposition parties fight an uphill battle to engage more voters.
/thread
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.
There is actually some evidence that musk was unfortunately successful at reaching some of these people. There was a lot of talk about “strange” ballots that only voted for Trump and nothing else, usually called “bullet ballots.” Well apparently part of musks outreach plan was getting to low propensity voters and telling them “don’t worry if it’s confusing, don’t worry about knowing the candidates, the only thing we need is a vote for Trump and he’ll fix everything.”
It seems like it worked out for them… :(
The bullet ballots were such a statistical anomaly. They should have been investigated/double checked.
less people voting helps conservatives, thats why they use disenfranchisement, voter suppression and gerrymandering in the states, plus the all the propaganda “your vote doesnt matter” is drilled into peoples heads.
voter suppression is designed to discourage voting as well.
maybe they just consider those people successfully suppressed
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.
Polticalitcians?
Polt-i-cal-it-cians.
Reaching means addressing their issues. Addressing one person issues will probably conflict with other person issues. Wich mean that a choose have to be made on to who represent.
Some people are easier to address than other. Some people are more exigent to their representatives than others. Making it not wort it trying to address them.
It’s important to mention that just by “mentioning” people in your campaign those people are not going to vote you. You need to do specific politics that solve the problems they may have. Which is not easy and most of the times it opposes what other people want you to do.
You’re asking why the politicians don’t reach out to the 34%. Meanwhile for the past 10 years politicians have been ranting about dead people voting. A statistic that is blatently false, and has NEVER shown any significant amount of votes coming from dead people. They did find some confusion when old people voted early by mail, but died before election day. But those numbers were a rounding error at best.
So maybe these politicians are thinking “Well we can’t reach the non-voters because they’re dead!”
And then they go on fox news and argue about frogs being gay, or whatever bullshit to distract from actual issues.
Meanwhile, Trump won with only 28% of registered voters. The GOP is the minority, our political/voting system is by design.
