I see that you’re just in touch with the realities of young workers as Hillary Clinton was. Shocking that she wasn’t more popular with young people.
You know why Sanders was so popular with young people? It’s because despite being a crabby old Silent Generation grandpa he acknowledged their crappy work situations and prospects instead of pretending that theirs were the same as his and instead of brushing them off as “imaginary.”
I get that you’re pretty dug in on this position. And having people dunk on you is surely not making it easy to take a step back. But maybe you want to give this one some time? Maybe think about where your predicates come from?
Like, if your whole proposition is that millennial are too lazy to look out for their own interests, why do you believe that? And why are you so committed to convincing others of it? Is this something which, if proven to be true, leads to some useful course of action?
A better, more productive course of action would be actively working on ways to get the younger generation motivated to vote, and then ensuring they have actual access to do so.
Let’s not forget the growing number of cases where people jumped through all the hoops, showed up at the polling place, and were told they’d been deregistered, or didn’t appear on the list.
On the books, those people count as “didn’t vote”.
Nor is any of this “young people don’t vote” rhetoric new. I remember this from ten years ago:
Funny how everyone likes to blame the young people for not stepping up to fix problems that they (the young) didn’t create.
Now, in the US, things are getting harder: you can’t just waltz in with ID and “official looking mail” and get a ballot. Not one that counts, anyway. Yet, somehow everyone expects a kid who’s navigating school and two jobs to also figure out how to register in a system that is becoming increasingly hostile, especially if they go to school in a different state than their “legal address” (i.e. mom and dad’s). Some states are deliberately making it as hard as possible for students to vote. Again, this is deliberate targeting, and most people bitching about how “it isn’t hard, I did it back in the day” don’t realise how much the rules have changed to make it hard.
Oh, and who did that to them? Those voted in by the same people who are now complaining about lazy kids.
Again: Absentee voting.
And you are still out of a job while fighting it with the company. You now have to put up with a boss who will look for any reason to fire you when you come back to work.
Hey, calm down! We’re mostly on the same page here, I think. We all want more people to vote.
If you read carefully, I made no attacks on you at all, I made no assumptions about your age, race, gender, income or anything else about you; I only responded to what you actually said.
You asked how what you said could be construed as privilege, I explained it. Anything else you read into the statement is your own baggage.
I’d suggest that you try to understand that even if an entire county somewhere were disenfranchised, that doesn’t change the fact that some people who COULD vote, DON’T vote. And the way I think, good or bad, doesn’t change that FACT.
Only 27 states allow for unconditional absentee voting. 20 others require an excuse (the remaining 3 are vote-by-mail). There are also only 34 states that provide early voting days.
The rules for acceptable absentee ballot excuses varies by state, but broadly they include: military service, illness/injury/disability, being an out-of-state student, and traveling out of state on the day of the election. Generally speaking, in these conditional states, absentee ballot distribution is at the discretion of the county clerk, so I’m sure there’s no issue with typically-disadvantaged people being denied absentee ballots on technicalities.
There are a lot of people who refuse to vote, and they should be encouraged to change that attitude. However, there are also a huge number of people who are unable to vote for legal reasons, are unable to vote for physical or mental reasons which prevent them from reliably being able to get to or stay at the polls, are afraid of losing their job if they take the time off to vote (whether it’s legal or not, businesses do fire people for protected reasons and then excuse it with any other of a litany of reasons to fire someone), think they’re registered but actually aren’t (whether because of voter ID laws or purges), are making best-effort attempts to comply with stricter registration requirements but have missed deadlines, or have given up because of the roadblocks placed in their way. And there are substantial roadblocks in many states that have been erected over the last couple of decades, many explicitly targeted at students, people of color, and the poor.
In a perfect world where everyone had immediate and easy access to a ballot, focusing on the people who refuse to vote would be the most prominent item on everyone’s to-do list. However, I think it serves us just as well – if not better – to first lower the bar for those who want to vote, but are unable to for any number of perfectly valid reasons. Focus more on the stories of people being actively prevented from voting, because they’re the low-hanging fruit when it comes to increasing civic engagement.
Voting is a right, and it’s an obligation. But it’s important to make it easy to exercise that right, and at the moment, it very often isn’t. It’s easy to sit in a computer chair and bang on about how people aren’t prioritizing their lives correctly if they’re putting food over voting (especially if you’re white, and double especially if you’re also male), but you’re not living their reality and you don’t know what they’re facing that might be demotivating them from taking advantage of that right. Again, voter suppression doesn’t have to be padlocks on the door or inscrutable literacy tests. It can be as simple as requiring only certain kinds of ID, then making it harder than necessary to obtain it. You might be able to take an hour off of work to go vote or vote before/after work (assuming you work nearby, have a car, can drive to the polling location, and the line isn’t out the door as it often is in many urban and suburban areas). But if you work weekdays, or you work multiple jobs, how easy is it going to be for you to take the extra time off work to go to the government office where they distribute valid voter IDs and sit around for hours waiting to have your name called? How easy will it be to drive back there and wait even longer if you forgot to bring/simply don’t have/the clerk rejects one of the forms of ID required to get that voter ID card? Now take out the car and say you have to go there by bus. Say your job is across town from the voter ID office, and you live even further away than that. How easy is it now? How much time and effort are you willing to invest in this process? How much time and energy do you have? Say you have a physical or mental disability. How easy is it to navigate this mess now?
The 18 to 24 age bracket has had the worst voting record for a very long time - predating the current toxic environment. I remember it being discussed in the 70’s.
The GOP is definitely ramping up their voter suppression efforts. It is reprehensible. But even with that, there is no denying how we wound up with Drumpf as president - the people who turned out for Obama did not turn out for Clinton. That was not voter suppression. It was disillusionment feeding voter apathy.
Yes, there is voter suppression.
Yes, young voters statistically have the lowest turnout.
Both these things are true. Both need to be overcome.
Good information, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are talking about two different, separate issues:
The existence of #1 does not negate #2.
And don’t think for a moment that just because I acknowledge the existence of #2, that I am not angry about #1.
Is there any evidence that compulsory voting laws like there is in Australia or Brazil would work in the US?
And yet a relentless focus on #2 sure seems like the kind of thing that could be used to distract from and discredit efforts to assist #1
ETA: also, this frames it as a pure binary, when many cases are going to exist on far more of a continuum. Some people are disenfranchised in a way that they have no way to resolve. But I would hazard that most cases of voter suppression exist on more of a continuum between #1 and #2, where the voter isn’t technically disenfranchised, but obstacles to voting present a serious barrier
Best ‘get young people to vote’ political ad I’ve ever seen.
I love that VOTE logo: Shows a fist bopping Trump on the back of the head.
Yep; we need to fix BOTH problems, and not waste time and energy arguing over which issue is more problematic.
Even if there WASN’T evidence of that, the GOP and Big Business would take no chances; she’d try with all their might to shoot the notion down in flames.
Ever heard of mail-in ballots?
I’m turning 50 in 2 days. I agree with you.
I’m not sure I agree that a non-vote is a vote for the GOP. I think it might be a vote for nobody. Not all young people are going to cast a vote for the Democrats.
