There is an old saying by Mark Twain: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”, and I think this holds true to most of our western “democracies” on a grand scheme of things. Not in like the little regional votings in small towns or villages, but on a national level. I’ve checked different elections in the past in “western countries” and in many of these 40% percent or even more of the voting-age population didn’t vote at all. Why is that? The answer is simple, each new election Politicians promise changes that will benefit the people but in the end they are just lying to them in order to get the most votes. Once elected they usually don’t follow through on their claims and most people by now have figured this out and have resigned because they learned that in the end voting doesn’t change a thing. The remaining 60% of the voting-age population or at least a big chunk of them are hopeless romantics who probably think that, “this time it will be different”. This time they will follow through on their promises.
There are certainly more factors to it but this is I think the biggest issue of all.
Now since only 8 to 12% of the “voting-age population” is voting at the moment one could argue that the described issue at top can be translated into our current “voter apathy” issue on the Optimism Collective. Now how do we change that?
The only option that comes to my mind is to eradicate this presumption by showing that their vote can actually make a difference and actually change something. But in order to do so we first need an incentive for people to vote. The different options coming to my mind can be found here.