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To be honest I feel that to count yourself as "not part" of American society is an absurdity when you are a legal US citizen, have a social security number, participate in the economy, pay taxes, and certainly if you collect on government benefits in any way (unemployment compensation, disability payments, social security payments, student financial aid, etc.).
Sorry to harp on the subject of taxation, but I can't seem to take it out of the equation when I consider the subject of voting. Why, exactly, does anyone want to be taxed but not represented in government? As a US citizen you have no choice about being taxed, unless somehow you can manage never earning, receiving, or spending a single penny (well, actually I think it's more like anything over $6000 but you get my point). I have a younger brother, he's 24, who refuses to pay his taxes, "on principle." Well, that's nice, but someday he's either going to pay his taxes plus a heap of penalties & interest, or he's going to go to prison. The government is, right now, spending your money. Do you not care how it's spent? That's the most selfish but in a way the most immediate & pressing reason to vote.
To reject the ability to have a voice in government seems almost perverse. In fact I do think a compulsory vote would be "legislation made in order to protect the wellbeing of others." When 20% of voting-age Americans don't have health insurance, 68% of them disapprove of the job the president's doing, 12% are below the poverty line (and the poor belong disproportionately to certain demographics)... and only about half vote in major elections, I think there is some legislation needed to protect the wellbeing of underrepresented people.
To be clear, I don't think anyone who doesn't vote "deserves what they get," or anything of that sort. But I guess I have to concur that they do choose it. They choose to let other Americans make choices that will likely profoundly affect their own lives. We do have some laws that "protect people from themselves," as it were. Massachusetts just passed a law that makes it mandatory for everyone in the state to have health insurance.
In looking for stats on how many people vote in the US, I found this study called The Choices Voters Make (WARNING, PDF). Take note of this paragraph on pp. 167-168 -
The puzzle of voting, or the calculus of nonvoting, is a topic whose emergence coincided with the appearance of rational choice theory in political science in the 1960s. Before then, virtually everyone took for granted that good citizens generally wanted to vote and would vote if given the opportunity. The failure of many people to vote in national elections typically was attributed to poor information or a lack of citizen duty among nonvoters. (Of course, everyone recognized that the failure of African-Americans to vote in the South was due to the fiercely enforced laws effectively barring their participation.)
When economists began to take on the topic of voting, which previously had been in the sole domain of political scientists, they pointed out that most people, political scientists included, had thought about the problem all wrong.
Rather than just taking for granted the proposition that all citizens naturally wanted to vote in congressional elections, these scholars reframed the question to ask, Under what conditions will a rational egoist vote?The answer that this question elicited, “virtually never,” has been provocative enough to animate many voting studies ever since.
The study goes on to discuss why people don't vote, why they do, what effects those choices have on elections, etc. I think the final conclusion that people who vote tend to do so for pleasure is a bit hard to swallow, but some of the statistics and facts are pretty interesting. |
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