Every November, Americans cast their votes for public offices ranging from School Board members to President of the United States. Because we live in a democratic country where the government is determined by its people, you might expect that every eligible voter of this nation would show up to cast a vote to decide the future of their community and country. Surprisingly, only a slight majority of Americans vote in elections each year. The presidential election of 2012 saw only 58.2% of eligible Americans go to the polls according to The Huffington Post. This was a decrease from the 2008 election which had 61.6% of voters show up to the polls.
Just a few weeks ago, every state across the nation held their midterm elections to cast votes regarding Congress, Senate, County and School Boards. The New York Times reported that only 36.3% of voters casted their votes at the midterm elections, and just 36.7% of Virginians voted. But should citizens be forced to vote in all elections? I don’t think so. Sure, these statistics make Americans look like couch potatoes who are too lazy to get out of their house on a Tuesday and vote, but that doesn’t mean people should be forced by the government to vote.
People feel like they do not have the time to make it to the polls, and they don’t believe their vote matters. Election day is always held on a Tuesday, which means that many people are in their offices working from 9:00 to 5:00. Most voters don’t want to take time off from work to go to the polls, because their job is more important to them. When they get home from the office, they probably have even more things to do around the house. Taking time away from their daily routine is something a lot of voters are unwilling to do.
One of the biggest reasons why voter turnout is so low is because of the common belief that one person’s vote does not matter. The winner of the presidential election every four years is determined by which candidate receives the most electoral college votes. While the electors almost always vote with the majority vote in their state, there have been cases when the winner who received more electoral votes didn’t win the nationwide popular vote. This happened most famously in the 2000 election, when Al Gore won the popular vote, but George W. Bush became President with five more electoral votes than Gore. Most eligible voters do not think their vote matters because the electoral college has the final say.
Thomas Jefferson once said that “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” He believed that for a democracy to work, the people who were voting had to be informed and educated. Perhaps people do not vote simply because they feel they are not qualified or well-informed enough to do so. They feel that they do not follow politics closely to make such a decision. And they can make that choice, because they live in a free country. It seems a little backwards that United States citizens live in a country whose leaders are elected by the people, and some citizens choose not to vote, but this is the choice of those citizens. If they choose to refrain from voting, so be it. At least that thins out the lines at the polls on Election Day.
