Voter Apathy, Election Day Edition

November 2 is a very important day 50% of the time. Every other year all three quarters half almost half of Americans will turn out to cast their vote in time honored tradition. A tradition that thousands of our forefathers fought for, spilling their final lifeblood on foreign battlefields, so that their children may wake up on November 2 and say “Screw it, I’m too busy.”

But hey, don’t worry. At least that means that the rest of them are looking for the R or D and checking the box making an informed, reasoned decision based on values and logical data. /sarc

I recently found a few sets of statistics by the Washington Post, US Census Bureau and GMU that I found utterly fascinating and read in detail. Since most other people are not uber geeks like me, I’ve distilled the more interesting tidbits and decided to throw it into a blog below.

First, the entertaining bit. An article by the WaPo reveals what we thinkers already knew: Most voters are sheep. They highlight a few interesting numbers from various polls, including a Zogby poll from August, 06, which found that “only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them”. Dear God in heaven. There’s only three of them! Executive, Legislative, Secret Underground Cyber-Ninjas, and the Judicial branch. But wait, there’s more:

• Fewer than half knew who Karl Marx was.
• Only 49% knew America was the only country to have ever used a nuke in a war (Why? Because we’re awesome!)
• A whopping 20% of young voters read the newspaper. Never fear, however. That is completely made up for by the 11% of young voters who use the Internet for news. Sweet.
• At least they follow the important things. Like the 20% who knew about Kabul being captured from the Taliban. Or the 32% who followed the anthrax attacks or the recession. Or how about the 60% who followed the attacks of 9/11. (Let that sink in. It means that, as the article points out, 40% of the “young people” demographic, of which I am sometimes counted a member, didn’t give a f&*k about the most deadly attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.)

Now on to the juicy statistics.

The Census Bureau posted this 20 page report in pdf for all the world to see. I also found GMU's Elections Project, which displays statistics for the past few elections in a very easy to read, concise list without any BS to couple with it.

The following statistics are all about the 2008 election, which keep in mind had a ridiculously high turnout rate. Here's what I found interesting. Of the VEP, or vote eligible population, about 71% of the population is registered to vote. While the overall voting rate was 63.6% for all the VEP, the rate among those who had previously registered was 89.6%. This shows that the vast majority of those who take the five minutes it takes to register will actually vote in crunch time.

Here again the Young People are pulling their weight in an epic way. In 2008, at what is likely to be the most historic election these people are likely to see in their lifetime (arguably, depending on how highly you rate a female president vs. a black one), 49% showed up. That's up from 47% in 2006. Yes friends. The difference a historically unique and pivotal election makes compared to a relatively obscure midterm election is exactly 2%.

In general, voters in the Midwest were most likely to show up (66% vs. 63% elsewhere). Older voters are the most likely to show up at 70.3%, though the percentage only drops to 60% before you get to 25 years of age.

Minnesota takes the title for highest turnout, 77.7%, followed by Wisconsin (72.1%) and New Hampshire (71.1%). The lowest? Hawaii (50.5%), who narrowly defeats West Virginia (50.7%) and Arkansas (52.6%).

Scroll down to page 13 of the report and we get the reasons people didn't vote or register at all. The overwhelming majority responded with the very good reason, "Not interested in the election/not involved with politics." Yup. I mean, it's only the driving force of our entire governance system. Not a big deal.

How about this one: If we switch our statistics to the midterm, 2006 election, the overall participation goes to 40.4%. This time Minnesota can only muster 60.1%, while the loser, Mississippi, manages an impressive 29.4% of the VEP.

Don't feel like slitting your wrists yet? Consider this.

• Voter turnout, even in a highly publicized election, was 61.6%.
• If we're feeling amazingly generous we can say that perhaps three quarters of these people are actually informed, leaving us with 30.8%.
• Since most of these people are voting for one or other of the parties, and since that vote is usually roughly down the middle with just a few percentage swings either way, that means the party in power represents the wishes of half of the informed voters, or about 15.4% of the population.

"Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote"
- William E. Simon, Fmr. Secretary of the Treasury

If you can't be bothered to vote, then don't complain. If you can't be bothered to do 20 minutes of research out of an entire two year election cycle, then stay at home and don't vote.