The question with a million answers and yet seemingly unanswerable. Polls and other means of obtaining data about the electorate are usually pretty useless for getting an answer. Lots of anecdotal accounts but what do they tell us?
Can we agree that for some reason a trip to the polls does not seem worthwhile for a lot of people. We can dismiss those instances where weather or transportation problems or obligations make it too difficult. What is in need of understanding is why some people just stay home at election time.
Even this category has many possible subgroups. Some people are registered from past interest and have since lost it. The real sticky group are those who consider themselves democrats yet do not bother to vote.
I wish I had answers to this question but my own bias about our system makes me unreliable at best. Read on below and I'll explain.
My bias is for a parliamentary system with many parties. We do not have that and I believe we suffer greatly for this. One of the biggest advantages of most parliamentary systems is the ability to bring he government down. This also clearly has dangers in it but I think the positive features outweigh them.
I will be 78 in a little over a week. I am an academic and have lived and worked in Israel (1963-65), France (1974 and 1992, with many shorter stints as well), Gemany(1986) and have had stays of at least a few weeks working in Italy, Israel, France, Holland, Spain, and Poland.
My involvement in elections was most intimate in France where I was allowed to be present when ballots were counted in my host's small village. I found the French system very much superior to ours.
In each of these places the political system was coupled tightly to a lively political discourse everywhere I went. Talking politics was the norm.
In the 1960s when I first was voting, I found more approximation to what I experienced abroad even if it was not as widespread here even then.
Even a year living in a country is but a snapshot of the life there, yet it is an education as well. My life as an academic put me in a place here at home where those around me were more apt to discuss politics and the Universities I was attached to had plenty of internal "sandbox" government to make one get worked up quite often.
Now, as I look back over all this, I have become very disenchanted with our system. Yet I vote without fail. I vote when the lesser of two evils is still an evil to me. So what is the difference? why do so many virtually call me a fool as they sit elections out? Down deep inside I feel like they may be right.
I don't own a TV and detest it. I live on the internet as far as my supply of information is concerned. I spend many hours reading and writing and participating. This does little for me for I still see our two party system as a very sophisticated form of theater. It is bad theater but it is very effective.
Look at all the crazy people out there who spout lies with impunity and threaten to control us even more than we are controlled already. We have to vote to stop THEM. Then there are the monied people buying the time on TV and owning much of the media. We have to stop them don't we? They destroy scientists and spread religious dogma as well as slandering our candidates. So if I don't vote I make them more apt to win, right?
The problem is that when we do win they still get to have control over us rather than our having the freedom that the myths about our form of government promise.
I have written much here about the way these elections consume us and our resources. I am lectured about how "elections do have consequences".
Why do I end up participating knowing how futile casing a ballot really is? maybe that is the question I should be trying to answer rather than the one this diary poses?
Meanwhile we stand at the possible brink of some real catastrophic changes due, in large part, to our inability to govern ourselves effectively. We really don't need a weatherman to tell us which way the wind is blowing. Maybe that is what those who stay home at election time believe too?