This election could make not voting a principled act
Time was, presidential years featured solemn sermonettes about the citizen’s duty to vote, and the virtue of prodding the apathetic to plod, even if sullenly, to the polls. There has, however, always been a twofold difficulty with such civic piety: Even in normal times — remember those? — there was no such duty. And hectoring the uninterested and indifferent to express their opinions with ballots must lower the caliber of election results.
This is not a normal time. Granted, scores of millions of Americans normally — and reasonably — think their political options should be much better: The memory of man runneth not to a time when voters exclaimed, “What a divine presidential choice we have this year!” Still, 2024 is so abnormal, consider, without necessarily embracing, an argument in defense of principled nonvoting. Plainly put, the argument is: Elections register opinions. Abstaining from voting can express a public-spirited and potentially consequential opinion.
Regarding the supposed duty to vote, the right and ability to ignore politics is an attribute of a good society. (Totalitarian societies forbid not participating in the enveloping politics.) As for the supposed duty to become satisfactorily informed:
Polls showed that in 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis, only 38% of Americans knew that the Soviet Union was not a NATO member. In 2006, only 42% could name the government’s three branches. The average American works harder at being informed when choosing a refrigerator than when picking a president.
Many nonvoters’ inertia reflects rational ignorance: The chance of any person’s vote affecting an election result is vanishingly small, so why bother? In most years, the disposition of most states’ electoral votes is not in doubt (this year, in perhaps at least 40 states), so why bother?
Writing in the Financial Times, Simon Kuper notes that the number of U.S. newspaper journalists has shrunk by two-thirds since 2005. That in 2023, for the first time, cable and broadcast TV combined accounted for less than half of U.S. television viewing. And that news is less than 3% of what users see on Facebook. Politicians are losing what Kuper calls the competition in “the attention economy”: “Why let journalists you don’t trust tell you about politicians you don’t trust?”
Still, voting gives the emotional satisfaction of participation in a national moment of shared responsibility and common purpose. This is one reason to regret the transformation of Election Day into Election Month — or more. This year, however, some might consider forgoing the satisfaction of voting to send the parties a message.
This year, many millions of voters so intensely dislike one or the other of the two major candidates, fury will propel them to the polls. But suppose bipartisan disappointment propelled millions to boycott the election? Imagine a dramatic upsurge in nonvoting that was explainable as a principled protest.
This could not be measured in exit polls because nonvoters do not enter the polls. But talented psephologists should be able to find a way to measure the size of a cohort that abstained because of thoughtful disgust.
In 1948, the first presidential election after World War II and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four elections, with the Cold War beginning, turnout might have soared. Actually, at 52.2% of eligible voters, it was the second-lowest of the past 80 years. (The lowest was 51.7% in the 1996 contest between President Bill Clinton and Sen. Robert Dole.) Much the highest turnout since World War II was 66.6% in 2020, the highest since 1904. It was 6.5 points above 2016, a result of proand anti-Donald Trump passions. High turnout is a more reliable indicator of national dyspepsia than of civic health.
It might be a constructive signal to both parties if, for the first time in a century, more than half the electorate would not vote. (Only 48.9% voted in 1924.) Voters’ eloquent abstention would say that they will return to the political marketplace when offered a better choice.