Is Voting a Waste of Time?

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
~George Jean Nathan~

We in America do not have Government by the majority; we have Government by the majority who vote.
~Thomas Jefferson~

Both quotes above were so appropriate that I couldn't decide which to use so I used them both.

It's a shame how much voter apathy there is in the US.  Sadly, this is not a new trend. I did a little research and found a website (www.fairvote.org) that lists voter turnout for all presidential elections from 1916 through 2012.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered the largest voter turnout was in 1960 at just 63.8%.  The lowest turnout was in 1924 with 48.9% voter turnout. Unbelievable.


Things get even worse when you consider the percentage of those who are eligible to register to vote are actually registered.  According to www.demos.org, an estimated 51% percent of eligible Americans are NOT registered to vote.  Now I don't know how Demos came up with that percentage but if I were a gambling person, I'd bet they're not far off the mark.


So, now we have about 64% of 49% of Americans determining who leads our country and makes our laws.  If my calculations are correct (forgive me if math was NOT my best subject), that means that less than one third of adult Americans who are eligible make all the decisions on who is elected to lead our country.  Even if a candidate is unanimously elected, he or she is chosen by a very small percentage of the citizenry.  What a sad state of affairs!  I promise you, though, that about 90% of all Americans - or higher - will offer an opinion on the outcome of any given election.


Can you just imagine how different things might be if a majority of Americans actually registered and then voted?  What must we do to stop the apathy of the American voter?  I don't have an answer because I just can not comprehend the mindset that "my one lousy vote doesn't matter".   What if that small percentage of voters all decided to stay home on election day because of that mindset?  The candidate with the largest family would probably win the election because you know they and their families are going to vote.


I'm issuing a challenge to every American who is legally eligible to register to vote to gather his or her family and their friends who have the same mindset and register NOW and then show up to vote on November 8, 2016 and cast a ballot.  Let's find out what happens if we have an election and everybody comes.