Many people don’t vote because it’s just psychologically inconvenient for them for the simplest, and even laziest, of reasons. A 2015 Washington Post article featured a survey conducted by the US Census Bureau on the reasons why registered voters didn’t vote on election day in 2014, the election day whose voter turnout was classified in the article as, “The worst turnout since 1942” [10]. 25% of the responses in the poll could be classified as the person being unable to make it to the polling center, whether because of illness/disability, being out of town, an inconvenient polling place, or having problems with transportation. The easy fix to these issues would be to expand early and mail-in voting. According to the National Conference of State
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Most ballots on Election Day have more than one government position up for a vote. Just because a person doesn’t like the candidates for one of the ballots doesn’t mean that they would dislike the candidates for the other positions up for election. Also, for those who are independent from a party affiliation, most ballots will have more than a Democratic and Republican candidate. A third party candidate could match the views of a voter perfectly, and if a person was to abstain from voting for that third party candidate simply because they are very unlikely to win a national election, they are preventing that third party from gaining more national attention for future elections. Plus, it is very possible to simply abstain from voting on one part of the overall ballot and still vote for the rest of the races. Another excuse similar to this would be that a person doesn’t want to vote because they are uninformed about the candidates. However, with technology advancing as drastically as it is, the ability to quickly look a candidate up online 15 or 20 minutes before leaving to vote is almost unacceptable for anyone with computer access. As long as a person has even a little interest in who their government leaders are, there really are very few, if any, excuses not to vote, and by convincing more people of this, turnout rates will only be able to
Most ballots on Election Day have more than one government position up for a vote. Just because a person doesn’t like the candidates for one of the ballots doesn’t mean that they would dislike the candidates for the other positions up for election. Also, for those who are independent from a party affiliation, most ballots will have more than a Democratic and Republican candidate. A third party candidate could match the views of a voter perfectly, and if a person was to abstain from voting for that third party candidate simply because they are very unlikely to win a national election, they are preventing that third party from gaining more national attention for future elections. Plus, it is very possible to simply abstain from voting on one part of the overall ballot and still vote for the rest of the races. Another excuse similar to this would be that a person doesn’t want to vote because they are uninformed about the candidates. However, with technology advancing as drastically as it is, the ability to quickly look a candidate up online 15 or 20 minutes before leaving to vote is almost unacceptable for anyone with computer access. As long as a person has even a little interest in who their government leaders are, there really are very few, if any, excuses not to vote, and by convincing more people of this, turnout rates will only be able to