One of the main storylines of he 2020 Presidential Election has been voter turnout. After dismal turnout numbers in 2016, particularly among registered Democrats and Independent voters, 2020 has seen the largest number of total votes in any American election, and the highest turnout by population percentage since 1900. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated countless changes to American society, not the least of which has been nationwide expanded access to mail-in voting for the first time in modern history.
This is likely to be the first presidential election where the candidate that I’ve voted for has won. I was born in Upstate New York — not ‘Yonkers Upstate’, try ‘we-live-closer-to-Canada-than-Long Island-Upstate’ — to a fairly conservative family. My father is a Naval Academy graduate and used to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. I was raised with traditional conservative values of personal responsibility, dedication to family, and the idea that government-run services are never as effective or efficient as a privately run alternative. Oddly enough, living in a small rural community insulated me from overt racism to a degree. There simply were no people of color to discriminate against. I sure did get to see the worst of poor white folks though.
I did not have a Black classmate until 9th grade, when I met this person for a pre-season cross-country team practice. Going to high school with and having Lopez, and later some fellow Lost Boys of Sudan, as a teammate and friend had a profound impact on my life, specifically in coming to terms with my own privilege, and recognizing the good that can come from tilting the scales a little bit to give opportunities to those who have less privilege.
Growing up, my father was incessant about the importance of voting, making a point of the fact that he’d never failed to vote in an election since he’d been registered at the age of 18. I was taught that voting was essential and easy to do, and that it was a tragedy how few citizens of the country regularly voted. The implication being that non-voters were lazy and freeloading.
My senior year “Participation in Government” class had voter registration as part of the curriculum. Everyone who was 18 was given a little card to fill out, and just like that we were all set to vote. This was the spring of 2005, my class all remembered 2000’s ‘hanging chad’ debacle. The next election would be John McCain vs Barack Obama in November of 2008. I drove home from college to my small rural home town to cast a vote for John McCain.
I never voted for Obama. Despite my political views having shifted much farther to the left in college, I sat out 2012 and did not vote at all. I remember feeling disengaged with the political process in general, and that my vote in particular would not matter one way or the other. This did not please my father, who in fact did vote for Obama, and I once again got the voting lecture. This time, however, I discovered that my father enjoyed the military benefit of mail-in voting. He’d never had to change his registration and, despite living all over the country, he never had to go to the polls.
Every cycle, Americans are bombarded with reminders to go vote. We’re incessantly notified of our civic duty, and this year was more intense than usual. With expanded access to early mail-in voting, however, it would seem like politicians got their wish. In 2020 we voted to an extent that arguably overwhelmed the system we have in place for accounting for votes. This election was strange, to be sure, but it was also beautiful. It was disheartening to see the sheer number of Americans who came out to support racism, facism, and the corrosion of the country’s institution, but at least it was honest. More people turned out to repudiate the past four years and that is also honest. America will never be a homogenous nation, but we might at least strive to be honest in our intentions.
I will be writing a letter to my congresspeople urging for a national standard for mail-in voting for every election going forward, and I think you all should too. It’s apparent that this country does not have an adequate system in place to handle the volume of votes that our leaders always seem to be clamoring for. Everyone should have access to the same voting privileges my father had, the country undeniably will be better for it.
This is absolutely a thing that needs to happen. Showing up at the polls on election day is positively medieval (and this is from someone who enjoys the experience). Other countries that have embraced mail-in voting have much higher voter participation rates.
Hell, there are even countries who have Internet voting. You can’t tell me if I can bank or trade stocks online, there’s no way I can securely vote online. I get that might be a bridge too far right now, but voting by mail isn’t. It should be adopted as the standard.
…feels obligatory
As an IT professional I definitely believe that physical ballots are the most secure way to cast a vote. I think if there was a national mail-in voting infrastructure to process the large number of ballots, traditional in-person voting as a secondary method, we’d get higher turnout and consequentially better representational government. I think this election was a successful experiment with the form and there’s no reason not to try and iron out the kinks and base future national elections on this model.
This was my experience, too, growing up in Wisconsin farm country. There was no racism because there was only one race. So, it was quite a shock to my 4-year old self when I was introduced to my cousin, who was black. I learned as I got older that he was adopted by my mother’s cousin and his wife, but at 4 years old it simply didn’t compute.
BTW, the hanging chad election was in 2000.
Shit! You’re right. For some reason I thought that happened in Bush vs. Kerry. I’ll edit the post. Thanks!
I think where I lived a lot of people had racist tendencies precisely because they’d never met many actual black people, so all they had to go on was the stereotypes.
As has been posted everywhere else, and by many more erudite people than myself;
If voting didn’t occplish anything, they wouldn’t fight so hard to make it difficult.
And
I would have liked to added that if everyone voted, the Repugnicants would win anything. However, seeing the swells of putrid, fetid sewage in support of the fat, orange, tiny-fingered loser has me worried that even if we had close to universal suffrage, there would still be a chance for the worst in country to find public office.
Australia has compulsory voting (if you don’t vote you get fined. if you don’t have a valid excuse) and they elect all kinds of crackpots.
…and eggheads
I’m afraid you may be right. I think the orange dummy by attacking mail-in voting may’ve lost votes. If I’m not mistaken, a majority of seniors voted for him and generally vote GOP. Probably a lot of them were afraid of COVID and stayed home. If he had embraced mail-in voting, they would’ve mailed their votes and Biden wouldn’t be winning mail-in votes 2 to 1. Of course all this isn’t backed by numbers. Maybe we’ll find out how true my hypothesis in the near future.
Also, seeing the GOP winning house and state legislature seats when I thought the dems would eat into the GOP state legislature advantage, I think the dems should forget about nominating an old un-charismatic person again. No more Bidens. We need candidares that will excite the base. Otherwise the losing will continue.
Bingo. I’m not even remotely surprised at how close the presidential race is, or the poor results in the down-ballot races. Guess what, though. The DNC will continue to make damned sure that there will be no liberal candidates to excite turnout, pretty much ever.
PS. Voter suppression is another factor, but without the senate and no state legislature gains what the heck can dems do there?
BTW, a few days ago I remember a discussion about how the inadequate/misleading the blue-red maps are. was it here? anyway, doesn’t this look better?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90572489/u-s-election-maps-are-wildly-misleading-so-this-designer-fixed-them
…pretty sure I included a link in one of the DOTs that was about not being misled by the maps that would be going around but you might be thinking of a different conversation?
with the information overload of this week I’ve no idea! probably at the DOT. but in any case, I thought this mapping-style looks good
…the stuff that reflects the population density does a good job of making it clear that the massive amounts of red on the “traditional” map isn’t representative of the overall population &/or popular vote…but maybe undersells the importance of the weighting that the electoral college votes none the less give certain places in terms of deciding the outcome
…so I figure it’d be a good default view but it helps to have the interactive sort of maps that let you toggle the way the “overlays” work a bit?
some good news?