c/dataishorrifyinganddepressing
If it makes you feel any better, the trend looks like more people are voting as time goes on.
As crazy as it is, Donald Trump appears to have been the single largest motivator to vote in American history. Either him or Covid.
He has definitely motivated me to vote twice, and for the rest of my life I won’t miss an election. Seriously. I had voted before, but I’d sit it out if I was too busy or I didn’t particularly like either candidate.
I have happily voted for Mr. or Ms. Not Trump twice. Now I also have to vote for Mr or Ms Not Influenced by Trump every chance I get too.
George Floyd too. 2020 definitely felt like the boiling point for a lot of things that centered around Trump in a 100% divisive way.
I did a protest vote in 2016 (my state has zero impact), but from now on I want to make sure the numbers show accurately who got the most votes.
I would also like to see a similar graph for mid-term elections. Do the winners even get 10% of the eligible votes?
The government should partner with McDonald’s and offer a free double cheeseburger with proof of voting.
Election Day should be a national holiday to give folks a chance to vote.
No postage needed in California, nor Massachusetts if I recall correctly. Does your state really make you find a stamp to vote in 2024? That sucks, sorry to hear that.
I mean, at least put it on the weekend, like other countries (or at least mine).
Allow early in-person voting centres and postal votes. Make it convenient.
Though, maybe these are only widespread in mandatory voting counties (like mine), because you’d get massive complaints if it wasn’t convenient.
Turnout is unsurprisingly, very high here.
The government should pass a law that it’s required to vote, or give a reasonable explanation why you can’t. Employers are punished for keeping their employees from voting.
Hi, it’s me, Australia, you might remember me from such democratic innovations as the secret ballot and mandatory voting, America will never have mandatory voting because it works about as well as gun control, single payer health care, and the metric system.
Also many places have mandatory voting but very few enforce it, I would put money on America being one of those places if it somehow got a foothold.
That is.
It reminds me of a time I got arrested for giving a nice old lady a bottle of water while she was waiting in line to vote in Georgia and it became a big deal. I got charged, convicted and sentenced to prison time but luckily my friend Jerry Seinfeld springs Larry out of jail after he discovers a juror broke his sequester, causing a mistrial and the sentence being thrown out.
Counter-proposition: you get to choose - either you cast the vote, or you get the free burger.
I think the free burger would entice more people to vote than the threat of getting a burger if you don’t.
But you would remove people who would prefer burger to participating in democracy from the equation.
The percentages for 2016 only add up to 97, and the 40% bar is longer than the 41% of 2012.
Maybe 3% voted for a third party, and because they aren’t shown the other bars were expanded to fill the entire space
Also, sometimes it say “won” or lost" behind the candidates, sometimes there is an asterisk, but for many entries, there is no information who won and who lost?
Maybe a really dumb question and I’m not from the US but why did Hilary lose in 2016 when she had more votes than Donald Trump? That doesn’t really make any sense to me
Because we have this stupid thing called the electoral college. Basically, each state has a certain number of votes, based (roughly) on population (its a whole other issue), and the states’ votes are cast for whoever won the most votes within their state (barring rogue electors and the few states that use proportional representation for votes.) Theres a total of 538 votes, and all that matters is winning more than half of them. This has made the winner of the popular vote lose the election 5 times (though in 1824, it went to the house of representatives for a final decision because no one had a majority.)
To summarize: not a dumb question, VERY dumb answer.
It’s funny that even even if the weight was distributed equally by population (it isn’t), it’s not based on number of people voted. so, in theory if only one person votes, their vote still has the same weight as the whole state.
That’s my understanding anyway.
Also to clarify further, the founding fathers created the EC specifically to override the popular vote, because they were afraid that land owning men might be too poorly educated to actually make decisions about our “democracy.”
Really let that sink in. They probably would have opposed the expansion of voting rights to anybody.
What a weird system! Is there a specific reason why the US decided to do elections this way instead of just using the normal tallied vote count? This just adds a huge layer of complexity to the elections - you’d think they’d want to keep it as transparent and simple as possible.
We were supposed to be a representative democracy with one rep for every 33,000 Americans. When voting for president each state gets one vote per rep and one for each of their two senators.
A while back some assholes decided that 33,000 is too representative and we should have a fixed number instead. So now it turns out that Wyoming should get one rep for every 58,000 Americans so their votes are worth far more than a Californian’s.
People don’t vote, states vote. Semi proportionally to number of people, but it isn’t linear. This means that California gets 50 some odd votes and they all go to the democrats most of the time but Wyoming gets 3 (the minimum) despite it being smaller than many cities in population and they all go to the republicans basically every time. That’s why swing states are a thing that exists and matters. Back in the 00s Florida and Ohio were in the sweet spot of big and could go either way (insert joke about my girlfriend) but now they’re both considered firmly Republican states, meanwhile Wisconsin lost its Republican status and now swings as did Arizona. When people talk about texas possibly becoming a swing state as a big deal this is why, it doesn’t matter who gets the popular vote, texas is so big and serves as a counterweight to California and New York for the republicans that if the democrats win Texas without the republicans picking up several states that they never get, all of the swing states, or one of the two big hitters of the Dems then there’s basically no chance for them to win.
