Voter turnout is abysmal in the free world. So P.J. O'Rourke will forgive me for quoting at length from a recent article of his in The Atlantic that addresses that very issue. I may be teetering on the razor's edge of a copyright violation, but I'm only performing a civic duty. So if posting this is wrong, then I don't wanna be right.
...do you know what causes low voter turnout in America? It’s the result of having the fate of our nation at stake. This began with the bitter presidential election of 1828, which pitted the education, cultivation, and puritan constraint of John Quincy Adams against the yahoo populism of Andrew Jackson, thereby deciding permanently whether America would become a shining city upon a hill or an overlighted strip mall along a highway. Voter turnout that year was 55.2 percent. A dozen years later, a small and unctuous incumbent, Martin Van Buren, the first professional politician to occupy the White House, ran against the vacuous William Henry Harrison, who would die from the pneumonia he contracted by giving an overlong inauguration speech in the freezing rain. Harrison’s platform consisted entirely of the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Van Buren’s platform was even less substantive. There were no issues of note. And voter turnout was 77.5 percent.
In 1860, when a vote for or against Abraham Lincoln meant deciding whether to fight a civil war, 72.1 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. In 1876, when a vote for or against Rutherford B. Hayes meant bubkes, 82.9 percent of eligible voters showed up.
In 1932, with Republicans and Democrats offering radically different political and economic responses to the Great Depression, voter turnout was 56.8 percent. In 1940, with the reelection of FDR a foregone conclusion, turnout was 62.9 percent.
Another way to guarantee that a lower percentage of eligible voters will exercise the right to their franchise is to guarantee their franchise rights. Voter turnout in the presidential election of 1916 was 61.9 percent. Then, in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving the vote to women. Voter turnout in that year’s presidential election was 49.2 percent. The Voting Rights Act, ensuring access to the polls for blacks, was passed in 1965. Voter turnout went from 63.3 percent in 1964 to 62.5 percent in 1968. And after the voting age was lowered to 18, in 1971, voter turnout took a further dip, to 56.4 percent in the 1972 presidential election.
Extrapolating from the trend lines evident in Historical Statistics, we see that if one of the 2008 presidential candidates is a vicious moron (entirely possible) and the other is a beneficent genius (not as likely), and all life on Earth is threatened because al-Qaeda has discovered a way to poke every American with a sharp object simultaneously (could happen), and we extend the franchise to absolutely everyone, including preschoolers, citizens of the EU, illegal aliens, space aliens, and household pets (probably resulting in a better-informed electorate), we could achieve a voter turnout of zero.
