Why Vote?

It actually matters: turnout, turnout, and turnout

In my post of August 13 on increasing partisanship in Iowa, I pointed to the significant decline in the percentage of No Party registered voters as compared with those who register as Democrats or Republicans. 

With apologies to registered Libertarian and “Other” voters, I want to look again at some numbers from the Iowa Secretary of State’s website with an eye toward a general argument about voting (https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/pdf/2020/general/statestats.pdf).  I’ve constructed three charts.

First, let’s compare Iowa’s statewide party registrations as of September 1 of 2008, 2016, and 2024:

As you can see, Republican registrations are proportionally up by a third since 2008, whereas both Democratic and No Party registrations are down by not-insignificant percentages.  This increasing Republican advantage is heightened substantially by the fact that the different groups turn out to vote at different rates.

Specifically, look at Iowa’s voting turnout for the 2020 presidential election:

Clearly, Republicans turn out more reliably than Democrats, and both turn out more reliably than No Party registrants.

Age and sex are important factors:  older voters of any registration turn out more reliably than younger voters, and women almost always turn out at higher rates than men.  Thus:

Now, does any of this matter?  At the risk of sounding naïve, yes.  You can knock your right to vote, of course, arguing that the whole system is rotten and doesn’t deserve the affirmation that voting would give it.  But for those of us who live in the real political world, the right to vote is all we’ve got.

If the right to vote doesn’t mean anything, then why were so many black and white voting-rights activists in the South intimidated, injured, or even murdered when they sought to register black voters?  Anyone casually dismissing the right to vote today insults their memory.

Who in your family is not registered to vote?  Who is registered but doesn’t vote regularly? Chart 2 above shows that, statewide in 2020, almost one-fourth of active-registered voters did NOT vote despite their being registered.

Scholars and other such observers normally argue that poor or even mediocre rates of voter turnout are a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with our politics.  However, others argue the reverse, namely, that lower voting rates are not so much a sign of alienation as an indication of satisfaction.  Many voters, by this logic, are sufficiently satisfied with whatever results might be produced by an election that they don’t think that voting is worth the trouble—they’re okay with the results either way.

I recall driving my car one election season a few autumns ago when I heard a woman being interviewed on a national radio program.   Whichever presidential election it was, she was displeased by the two major-party candidates she saw as her options. 

When she said, “I may not vote at all—I just don’t want to get my hands dirty”—I almost drove off the freeway as I reacted with great annoyance.  I thought, “Who in the world are you that you’re so pure that you don’t want to soil your dainty little hands, preferring to impose that ‘dirty’ task on the rest of us?”

And, if you’re thinking of voting third-party, remember that for those of us in the real political world, doing so in the American political system is simply a meaningless waste of time.  We are not a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation, such that candidate or party so-and-so gets 12% of the seats in the legislature if it gets 12% of the vote.

We do not have truly national elections.  There are 100 separate statewide elections for the U.S. Senate and 435 separate congressional-district elections for the U.S. House.  The closest we get to a national election is a presidential election, but there too we know that presidential candidates run not nationally but in 50 separate state elections plus Washington, DC.

These complications—or should I say, “features of the American electoral process”?—mean that third or “minor” parties rarely have much of a chance in national politics.

Like it or not, in our winner-take-all system one of the two major-party presidential candidates is going to win the election.  In 1992 Ross Perot received about 19% of the popular vote but no electoral votes,  while in 1968 George Wallace received 46 electoral votes with 13.5% of the popular vote.  Yes, their candidacies had long-term political impacts, but not through winning  the presidency.

Exercising your right to vote may not be sufficient to bring about the policy goals you seek, but it is certainly necessary.  A change in our political culture that leads to changes in our political institutions and practices might serve the interests of various groups critical of our current political system, but in the immediate term, the vote is all we’ve got.

Use it

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