Counting Your Vote

In a sense if you stay home on election day, you are accepting the decision of everyone who did vote.

With only 53 and change percent of the eligible population bothering to vote (on average), it's a popular choice to stay home and not bother.

But... always a but:

There's some solid reasons for not voting.  It's a small list though.  You'd have to have hard reasons not to vote for any of the candidates because all of them violate some tripwire issue or value.

That's hardly a person who refuses to vote though.

53.6% of the eligible voters actually vote, but 84.3% of the people who register to vote do so.

It makes you wonder why they bothered to register then not bother to, you know, VOTE...

But let's assume that every one of the 235 or so million people of voting age is an eligible voter.

125,960,000 people vote out of 149,418,742 registered.  About 25.5 million people are signed up to vote who don't go to the polls.  That's more than the population of Florida!

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, and assuming they don't vote because of sound moral principles...  85.6 million people have no excuse to complain how the election comes out.  They didn't even register.  Almost a third of the overall population!

Normally when I hear someone bitching about the election, I ask whom they voted for.  If they say they don't vote, I do ask why.

If they dare to say that their vote doesn't count, I tell them to stop talking about politics because they didn't even try to have their vote counted.

I've had some really interesting conversations with people who have solid reasons to vote "none of the above because they all..." but this voting thing is actually something that people died to leave to you.

Yes YOU.