Other people have said that the reason people don’t vote is their beliefs that the two party system doesn’t work, but that is my entire reason *for* voting.
I spend every election cycle vociferously trying to convince anyone and everyone I can to vote for a third party candidate to protest the two-party system.
Even if we are voting in a “swing” state, our votes only count for that particular state’s election. Everyone in Florida could vote for Candidate A but it doesn’t help if he or she’s trailing Candidate B in Ohio. These aren’t like rollover minutes. You can’t lend another state your excess votes.
And if the guy you chose to represent your state in the electoral college turns out to be a “faithless elector” and go against what you voted them in for (as has happened a few times, once that I can recall recently but the name escapes me) then all bets are off.
So our votes really don’t matter. They are there to give our electoral college representatives a guideline by which to vote for our particular state, and that alone, but they aren’t obligated to – because they are human. And if it happens to end up as a tie in the electoral college (which it has a few times) then then it goes out of their hands entirely, and the people have even less say in the matter.
The problem is that we’ve been deadlocked for over 20 years now without being able to elect anyone by a clear majority. The first Bush was the last president that actually had a large enough percentage of people and electorates without having to bring in complex calculations that confused the voting public.
Perot shook things up, and 20 years later the effects are more evident than ever. The two-party system (at least this one) is done. Whigs, Tories, Dixiecrats – they’ve all passed into history. We haven’t been Democrats and Republicans for 200+ years.
It’s time for another party to come in and inject some new blood.
Frankly, I honestly couldn’t care which one, because all politicians sound the same to me. They all pander to their constituents by telling people what they want to hear to get themselves elected and then continue to do (or not do) whatever the last person did who was in office. Sometimes they spend the entire time they are in office undoing the work of their precessors, or sometimes they just spend their time trying to unravel just what it is they were doing in the first place.
The most effective presidents throughout history are the ones that come in and simply keep going with whatever baton was already in play, no matter what they said to get elected, and adapt to major situations as they unfold, while you know, leading the country.
The least effective ones are the ones who get elected and then spend 4 years moving the needle backwards – whether out of spite, fear, who knows! – or who just don’t do anything at all. They tend not to get reelected though, so there’s that.
So, why don’t young people vote? Because they know all of this. Their vote really, truly does not matter. Changing the system is what matters – which is why Trump and Sanders have such huge millennial followings.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-young-people-vote
Originally Posted On: 2015-10-31