c/dataishorrifyinganddepressing
Seriously! I had no idea so few people voted.
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.
Very sad indeed, I will try my hardest to recuperate the DNV score.
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.
Pay for postage for mail-in voters.
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 have to ship it internationally
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.
Who would run the polling stations and run public transit?
You don’t have public transit on national holidays and Sundays? Next you are going to ask who is going to work in hospitals and restaurants
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.
Its actually illegal to do this. Yes, that’s stupid.
It should be whiskey like the founders intended
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.
Why would you want to do that?
because people who prefer short term profit don’t make smart long term decisions and elections are all about long term decisions.
I think any American of the age of majority should be able to vote easily and I don’t think there should be a burger purity test to be able to do so.
But if they want a free mediocre burger after it should be their reward to contributing to the democratic process.
Okay have fun advocating that hungry poor people shouldn’t vote
Right, all those poor hungry people who are one imaginary burger away from dying to malnutrition. Good thing they have you on their side!
A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.
How about a $200 tax receipt from the government itself?
If they gave out monopoly pieces and gave away $1m they would have the entire working poor who don’t vote participate.
Didn’t Krispy Kreme offer a free donut to anyone with an I voted sticker at one point?
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
They could’ve done a little green sliver like they did for 1980.
Looks like '95 has 5% third party votes. The lower bound for visually representing votes here may be somewhere between 5% and 3% for the purposes of this graphic
Just like the sub on reddit, the data in DataIsBeautiful apparently doesn’t actually have to be beautiful.
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?
The asterisk is explained up top, and they only indicate who won when it is backwards from the popular vote total.
I’ve never understood why there is a voting system where the one with most votes can lose.
They usually justify it by saying it’s to prevent the tyranny of the majority (two wolves and a sheep biting on dinner).
But a case could be made that it’s a way to keep the elite entrenched.
Kinda makes sense. Would make more if the number of terms were the limiting factor. Two and you’re out for life. Sement that, no alleviating factors.
Who knows, maybe they even have that in place already.
That rule was added in the 1950’s.
The founders were a gentleman’s club. Which is basically a fraternity. They made up rules that made sense to a bunch of frat boy farmers with enlightenment libraries.
I wouldn’t call them farmers. Partly because a variety of wealthy professions were represented and mostly because the ones who called themselves farmers didn’t do any farming, they forced enslaved people to farm for them.
Fair
It was a compromise so the smaller states were willing to join the United States. Same reason there are two senators for each state.
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.
True.
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.
The copout answer is “Back in the day it made it easier to do federal elections since the US is so big” afaik
Tho really it’s just hard to change, the democrats are lazy/don’t wanna rock the boat, and the republicans benefit from it and are also evil
Because in the US democracy every vote is equal, but some are more equal than others.
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.
Also worth noting: Republicans have only once won the popular vote since the turn of this century, in 2004 for George W. Bush’s reelection, when he had both the incumbent advantage and was still riding the post-9/11 patriotism wave
or put another way, the democratic candidate have won the popular vote on 5/6 presidential elections this century
when he had both the incumbent advantage and was still riding the post-9/11 patriotism wave
And slandering John Kerry, actual veteran and protestor, with “swiftboating” horseshit.
W’s media goons were some of the slimiest motherfuckers ever to darken Washington’s marble halls.
It’s funny because here being incumbent usually is a disadvantage because you get blamed by all the crap that’s happening, even the little that isn’t their fault.
The median voter is woefully uninformed and largely votes on vibes and name recognition. Many fail to understand exactly what kind of power the president actually holds.
Personally I blame this in part on the death of journalism. Local newspapers keep going out of business which removes any accountability for local authorities, and the only way you know of anything happening is based on Facebook gossip dripping in all of the biases the individuals who are there when something happens. And the local news that still exists keeps getting bought up by larger entities that may or may not be politically motivated to try to sway opinions and set the conversation across the country. Or worse in some cases independent news outlets are simply threatened into not investigating or reporting on certain topics
Also the two prior as well. So 7/8
Only a 7% increase after that nightmare.
7% is enough to swing any election in history (the part of it that is shown on the chart)
I think even more horrifying is that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016
This makes me kinda ill. Like I almost cried a bit looking over these numbers. And I’ve seen some shit.
Should split this out by electoral college votes/states where the ‘did not vote’ could actually have made a difference. This is great info but also a bit misleading cause votes in swing states have more of an effect than increasing votes in deeply blue or deeply red states. The US president is not selected by a national popular vote. See on the chart how W Bush won the election but Gore had the popular vote, due to how the electoral college works.
Not discounting that more people should vote. I wish there were a national holiday in the US for everyone to get out and vote. But some votes matter more than others, depending on where you live, and this chart misses that nuance.
There is a map like that out there, if I remember correctly like 40+ states had “did not vote” win…
W Bush didn’t win the election due to how the electoral college works, he won it due to the corrupt supreme court. Not only did he lose the popular vote, he lost the EC as well.
Pretty much. My domicile is in one of the polarized States & the mail-in ballot costs $15 to send. It would be a waste of my money to send a ballot & since I don’t live there I have moral issues voting in elections for places I am out of touch with—leaving just federal content of the ballot.
Wait. Mail-in ballot costs money in the US? In other countries this is free.
Ludicrous shit
And even then 15$!!?! How much does it cost to send a regular letter there? Because that’s at most how much it should cost to vote by mail. (But it’s it should 1000% be free)
Yeah, and some of the biggest states (like California) solidly go for one party. So, the non-voters really don’t affect the presidential race there.
That orange party sure does win a lot of elections.
It’s the Voter Apathy Party.
There should be a tax incentive for voting or something
Step 1: make voting compulsory
Step 2: move it to a weekend
Step 3: easy access to prepoll or postal voting for people who can’t make it on the official day
Bonus step: change voting system to IRV, or even better, to something proportional like MMP or STV
There you go. America has a functioning electoral system.
Step 2 is out it is in most countries in Europe. But honestly I like how it is in the UK. You vote on a Thursday and people have legally mandated time off during that day to go vote.
I feel like a lot of people would definitely vote if it gave them paid time off from their work.
If you move to a weekend then it comes off their free time and they might be away etc
Also free and no hurdles mail voting.
Where do you get the legal time off thing? afaik that’s not a UK law - they would tell you to vote by post if you’re going to be at work all day.
What does help is that polling stations are everywhere - I’ve never had to walk more than a few hundred metres to vote, nor had to wait.
We’re going to need voter id
Or do it the other way around, the amount of money that the government can spend is limited by voter turnout.
Clearly if you can’t get people excited enough to vote for your policies, you don’t have a mandate.
Tankies think that’s already how the US electoral system works. They think voting for Biden made more bombs fall on Gaza
There should be a No Vote tax, make it just $1–10 or something small. If you vote, you don’t pay it. Use the money to help pay for administering the elections (wouldn’t cover everything, but it’d help).
Should we fix the system so that people both want to and can vote for candidates they want?
No, that wouldn’t be American. Make something punitive that can be disproportionately leveraged against the poor and marginalized community neighborhoods.
In Australia it’s $20. https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/non-voters.htm
Or do the opposite. Voting enters you into a lottery where the prize is you never have to pay taxes again.
How many are illegible due to prior convictions?
The chart says it’s only looking at eligible voters
But looking it up shows around 4.6 million were disenfranchised in 2022 because of convictions. In semi-good news, it’s gone down recently in part because more states are starting to allow people to vote after they’ve served time. So if people keep pushing in other states, it can hopefully keep going that way
I’ve always been of the opinion that if you don’t vote, I don’t want to hear a word complaining about politics, but I’ve really reached my breaking point with that bullshit. We’ve seen it over and over again how ambivalence leads to things getting worse for a lot of people (often including the ambivalent ones). At this point, I’m just cutting people off immediately when they start up and I know they chose not to vote. Shut the fuck up. If it wasn’t important enough to go to the ballot box, it’s not important enough for me to listen.
I think the people that are voting this down either didn’t watch the video or don’t understand sarcasm.
I’m sorry. I generally really like Carlin. but that’s a really bad take.
At the time that Carlin was saying this, it was probably a lot more accurate than today. The parties were pretty indistinguishable for a lot of the 80s and 90s, and then after that the Democrats got significantly better in some cases, and the Republicans went straight off the edge into wanting to kill anyone different than them or who wanted to stand in their way.
the Democrats got significantly better
Neo-liberalism has not been a win for the working class no matter who is in charge of swinging that particular bat.
Quick question, what do you think has happened to working class wages in the last 4 years, and what to income inequality?
