The campaigning for next year’s elections is starting to draw more attention, and with it comes a focus on voters and their mood. Which is all well and good, but it leaves out of the equation one large bloc of citizens: people who are eligible to vote, but don’t.
Over the years, a fair number of people I’ve encountered have confessed that they do not vote—and I often surprise them by pressing them on why they don’t. They give a multitude of reasons.
The most common is that they’re too busy, or that voting takes too much time. Plenty also say they’re turned off by politics, politicians, and anything having to do with government. “What difference does it make?” they‘ll ask. Or they’ll argue that money has so corrupted the political system that they want no part of it.
There are also legitimate reasons: people are ill or disabled, they didn’t know where to vote, or their polling place was hard to reach. Sometimes they didn’t meet their state’s registration deadline—which might be a month ahead of the election—or they ran into ID requirements that stymied them. On the whole, it didn’t take much to keep them away from the polling place.
