[mystraline]

Sure. I'll bite.

The majority in this country is "didn't vote". Multitudes of reasons for this.

They forgot.

They dont care.

They missed the registration deadline.

They're homeless, and no address.

They can't get proper papers, even though they are US born.

They're in prison/jail.

The candidates suck, so you dont vote.

Can't afford to take time off work.

They've been gerrymandered, so their votes are significantly degraded.

To think that the minority segment that, due to election game rules and FPTP, that a minority of the minority somehow reflects a majority? I wholly reject that.

[pton_xd]

It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...

[mystraline]

"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.

There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.

But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.

But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.

[WalterBright]

> mandate required voting

I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for.

A right to vote includes the right to not vote.

[defrost]

Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.

It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.

They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.

[autoexec]

> A right to vote includes the right to not vote.

Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.

[WalterBright]

Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.

[x______________]

Living in a civilized society with other people should have its social responsibilities, amongst others.

[AngryData]

Personally I don't find "tick atleast this one box and sign your name, otherwise you get a $20 fine" is too much to ask. If it wasn't the US I would assume most fines would still be ignored by the law anyways, but giving the US legal system another way to fuck with people is also kind of worrying when it is so bad already.

[RHSeeger]

> A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience.

Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.

[hellojesus]

I love mail in voting, but it does run the unique risk of having verifiable votes to third parties, which means it allows pay-for-votes.

No election can mitigate this so long as your vote is provable to a third party.

[mrighele]

There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA.

An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.

The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).

Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.

The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.

If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA

[SoftTalker]

In recent years, people can vote early, vote by mail, or vote on election day. Hard to see how a "holiday" for voting makes anything easier for anyone, though I could maybe support it if you eliminated all the other options.

[lostlogin]

Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state.

I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.

[SoftTalker]

In the US, states elect the president, not the people individually. This is a pretty foundational element of our constitution.

[mrguyorama]

Another foundational element of our constitution was denying women the right to contribute to society, and not establishing any form of succession and other blatant and stupid failures.

Maybe the framers can go fuck themselves.

Yet the framers quite literally told you to change what they made, so they agree.

[lostlogin]

Having a president which a minority of cast votes picked is a problem in my view.

[yazantapuz]

> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

In Argentina, elections are held on Sundays.

[koolba]

> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

> We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male.

> Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

> Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.

I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance.

> But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.

Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon.

> But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.

The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

[lostlogin]

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for?

When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?

There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?

[fwip]

> When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?

They are weighted - the House is allocated by population, and the Senate by state.

[lostlogin]

They are weighted in how they are elected. They aren’t weighted in how the members vote.

[claytongulick]

> Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for?

I prefer not to live in the Hunger Games world, personally.

Those books are a brilliant exploration of the tyranny of urban clusters.

The electoral college is an effective foil to that.

[lostlogin]

I wouldn’t call the US system ‘effective’. The US system is spiralling and it’s getting dystopian. The hunger games analogy is fitting, with The Patriot Games coming right up.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/18/politics/patriot-games-an...

[swiftcoder]

> Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting?

About half of all folks in US prisons are there for non-violent crimes, and we're talking about a relatively small percentage of voters anyway. Maybe ~3 million added to the ~244 million eligible voters

[SoftTalker]

For a consequence to be effective, you have to lose something. If you go to prison, the big thing you lose is freedom of movement. But other things, such as who you live with, what you eat, and the ability to vote are other things.

[swiftcoder]

I don’t think we have a broad consensus that incarceration is effective.

No longer being able to vote seems like a rather petty inconvenience to heap on top

[LocalH]

Voting is a civil right. People who are stripped of their right to vote should also pay zero taxes. You know, "no taxation without representation".

[Arainach]

>Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no.

>I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal.

Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.)

>We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.

[RHSeeger]

> > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

> Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here.

> > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

> We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter.

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.

[shiroiuma]

>"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.

This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly).

So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places).

So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election.

>We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix.

>A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too.

More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?

[thayne]

I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).

[reverius42]

"less than 50%" being 49.8%. Kind of winning on a technicality there.

[crote]

A big problem of the American two-party system is that you can't distinguish a vote against one party from a vote for the other party: Did all of that 49.8% vote for Trump, or was he the "lesser of two evil" for a lot of people who genuinely hated Harris?

[crote]

Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%.

The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.

[SoftTalker]

If you want people to vote at over 90% you need to make it compulsory as Australia does. IMO the problem with doing this is that the people who don't care or don't believe it matters are now going to be annoyed that they have to do it. They will vote randomly, or just pick the first candidate listed, etc. just to be done with it. I saw the same behavior in school by kids who didn't care about the standardized tests they had to take. They just filled in bubbles on the answer sheet at random.

If you don't care enough to inform yourself about the candidates or at least have a party affiliation, it's probably best that you don't vote.

[mrguyorama]

If you think the people who CURRENTLY vote "Care enough to inform themselves" then you are very silly.

Stupid people already vote. Wrong people already vote. Your system has to accept that interference no matter what.

[kevin_thibedeau]

This is nulled by randomizing the candidates position on the ballots.

[mikkupikku]

The point of letting people vote is to make people feel as though they're involved in the process so they're less likely to cause social unrest. If somebody is too apathetic to vote, they're also too apathetic to cause trouble and therefore it's not a real problem that they didn't vote.

[thayne]

That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.

[mhb]

Don't all the candidates base their strategies on the existing electoral structure? Why would he have wasted resources optimizing for a metric that isn't relevant? You don't know what the outcome would have been if he did that.

[reverius42]

I think he actually did get more than half the votes this time.

"Staying home" is not actually a vote, as much as people want it to be in their heart of hearts.

edit: sorry, I was wrong, he did not quite clear 50% -- looked it up and he got 49.8%.

[lostlogin]

The measure that interests me os the percentage of eligible voters that picked Trump - 31.6%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...

[rayiner]

Multiple polls have found that if everyone had voted, Trump would have won by even more. https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2...

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...

The average person who doesn’t vote is a low-trust individual who is skeptical about government and institutions. Those people are Trumpier than average.

[mrguyorama]

I would prefer that reality to our current one.

[Zak]

I thought I had a decent understanding of the 2024 election; people were unhappy with the status quo, therefore mistrusting the people and institutions they believed responsible for it. Then I saw this and its supporting data in your first link:

> Voters saw Harris as more ideologically extreme than Trump

... what?

[rayiner]

According to Gallup, the record high support for increasing immigration was about 36%. Harris presided over an administration that saw a large increase in immigration. So believe didn’t find it credible when she said she wanted to control the border. And the position of wanting to increase immigration is more ideologically extreme than Trump’s position of wanting to shut down the border to illegal immigration just as a factual matter.

The latest Harvard-Harris poll, which isn’t good for Trump, still shows people want to deport all immigrants here illegally by a 52-48 margin: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/HHP... (page 24). I don’t think even Trump intends to actually do that. He would have to dramatically escalate what he’s doing now in order to achieve that outcome.

[monero-xmr]

I mean you can make up all the excuses you want for losing an election but you still lost. Doesn’t make the result illegitimate

[olyjohn]

"you" lost? Did this guy you're replying to run for office? This whole my team vs your team bullshit is really one of the big problems in our country. No independent thought. Just stick with what news says. Always vote my team. Dumb. Here's a news bulletin for you, everybody lost.

[monero-xmr]

Parent posted a list of excuses for why people didn’t vote. Doesn’t change an election

[autoexec]

I think people not being able to vote because their right to vote has been taken from them, or their vote was made pointless through gerrymandering, or because of other acts of voter suppression does change elections. The ability for it to change the outcome of a race is why voter suppression happens.

People who don't bother to vote for any reason changes elections. It also makes it very hard to make claims about what the majority of Americans want, since so many didn't make their opinions known

[FeepingCreature]

You can't gerrymander a presidential election. How would that work? It's not district-based.

A majority of Americans either wanted Trump or didn't care enough to vote against him.

[wavefunction]

In my experience in Texas, the right-wingers have this system set up where votes that were legally cast can be denied validity by some sort of "citizens election integrity board." I had no issue voting in Travis County but when I moved to a more conservative suburban county address I ran into this. There's a multitude of ways for anti-democratic forces in the US to deny citizens their rights. And it really hardened my opinion of these sorts of people that would do that to me and others. If they say my rights aren't valid how valid are their own, certainly nothing I should respect given their treatment of myself and others. That's why I have no tolerance for the right-wing I've seen their real face.