...because they won't vote for anyone.
Collectively we've only had the better part of a day to process the results of the 2016 election, but in the age of information and technology that's plenty of time to start parsing through some of the relevant data, and the findings are fairly bleak.
Granted it's still early, and numbers are still being reported from a few of the slower precincts around the country, but it looks like about 125 million Americans voted for president during the 2016 general election. With roughly 245 million eligible citizens (according to the Federal Register), that's a turnout of just over 51%. That leaves over 48% of the adult population of these United States who couldn't be bothered to get up and exercise their most basic right as a citizen. Donald Trump will become the next president of the U.S. with the ascent of a mere quarter of eligible adults.
Collectively we've only had the better part of a day to process the results of the 2016 election, but in the age of information and technology that's plenty of time to start parsing through some of the relevant data, and the findings are fairly bleak.
Granted it's still early, and numbers are still being reported from a few of the slower precincts around the country, but it looks like about 125 million Americans voted for president during the 2016 general election. With roughly 245 million eligible citizens (according to the Federal Register), that's a turnout of just over 51%. That leaves over 48% of the adult population of these United States who couldn't be bothered to get up and exercise their most basic right as a citizen. Donald Trump will become the next president of the U.S. with the ascent of a mere quarter of eligible adults.
Now certainly, as many might say, some of that 48% are people who were unjustly purged from voter rolls and disenfranchised. Some may perhaps suffer from some condition that does not officially knock them off the eligibility estimate but may still make it exceedingly hard to vote, like homelessness, mental illness, or incarceration. But not 48%, my friends. The only way there can be 48% of the population that fail to vote is through pure, unadulterated irresponsibility.
Low voter turnout is nothing new, of course. Turnout for a Presidential election hasn't been over 60% since 1968, and the last time it made it over 2/3 was 1900. The reasons non-voters generally site for not voting are predictably shallow: that it seems like they don't really have a choice, that there's not much difference between the two parties, that there are so many millions of people voting that their vote doesn't really count, blah, blah, blah. Choosing a candidate to vote for would require them to rub two neurons together in a way to which they are not accustomed, so they decide to bag the whole thing.
In the past, this sort of unwillingness to lift a finger hasn't had a particularly disastrous impact. Sure, presidential elections have been decided by slim margins, and perhaps the best qualified candidate hasn't been elected, but at least both candidates have been reasonably respectable politicians who were not a threat to the republic.
This election was different. There has never been a Donald Trump before. We have literally elected (to shamelessly quote myself) a greedy, manipulative, vengeful, wrathful, tax-dodging, lying, racist, jingoist, megalomaniacal demagogue and serial adulterer who has defrauded thousands of employees, students, and business people, sexually assaulted dozens of women, encouraged foreign entities to commit cyber crimes against the US, and quite possibly raped children.
In the past, this sort of unwillingness to lift a finger hasn't had a particularly disastrous impact. Sure, presidential elections have been decided by slim margins, and perhaps the best qualified candidate hasn't been elected, but at least both candidates have been reasonably respectable politicians who were not a threat to the republic.
This election was different. There has never been a Donald Trump before. We have literally elected (to shamelessly quote myself) a greedy, manipulative, vengeful, wrathful, tax-dodging, lying, racist, jingoist, megalomaniacal demagogue and serial adulterer who has defrauded thousands of employees, students, and business people, sexually assaulted dozens of women, encouraged foreign entities to commit cyber crimes against the US, and quite possibly raped children.
And I get it, people don't like Hillary Clinton. They don't trust her. I get it! I don't really trust her, and only sort of like her. But do not think for a second that the choice was between two equally undesirable options. If you take everything that she has ever been accused of in her more than 30 years of public service and aggregate it, it wouldn't even be as bad as a quarter of what Donald Trump has said in this last year and a half, let alone done. Plus, in that time Hillary Clinton did a lot of amazing good for the people of this country as well, while the Donald was busy defrauding people, bankrupting businesses, sexually assaulting beauty pageant contestants, and starring in a lousy reality show. It is unconscionable for an eligible citizen not to have voted this year.
When I was a senior in high school, all the way back, long, long ago in 2008, I was required to take half a credit of government. Barack Obama was running against John McCain at that time, and I was really excited to cast my very first vote in such a massively important and historic election. During class one day our teacher urged us to vote, and informed us that we would be required to register to vote in order to receive a passing grade. One of my classmates got fairly angry about this, and said that she didn't want to vote. When asked why, she said something along the lines of, "I just don't want to get involved in all that."
In what I can only imagine was a combination of stress, excitement, senioritis, and my well-documented tendency to butt in I stood up in that classroom and yelled, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! You 'don't want to get involved in all that'? You don't want to take just a moment of your daily life to make sure that you're informed on the issues and in control of your own fate? Well, let me give you a guarantee, [student's name]: if you don't get involved in all that, it will get involved in you, and there won't be thing one you can do about it because you will have surrendered any power you had."
In the coming days, weeks, months, and, God forbid, years, there are bound to be non-voters who claim that they are innocent in all this; after all, they didn't vote for Trump. No, non-voters. You aren't getting off that easy. You helped bake this cake just as much as anybody else, and come January you're going to have to choke it down with the rest of us. Thanks for nothing.
In what I can only imagine was a combination of stress, excitement, senioritis, and my well-documented tendency to butt in I stood up in that classroom and yelled, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! You 'don't want to get involved in all that'? You don't want to take just a moment of your daily life to make sure that you're informed on the issues and in control of your own fate? Well, let me give you a guarantee, [student's name]: if you don't get involved in all that, it will get involved in you, and there won't be thing one you can do about it because you will have surrendered any power you had."
In the coming days, weeks, months, and, God forbid, years, there are bound to be non-voters who claim that they are innocent in all this; after all, they didn't vote for Trump. No, non-voters. You aren't getting off that easy. You helped bake this cake just as much as anybody else, and come January you're going to have to choke it down with the rest of us. Thanks for nothing.
