Not voting is a choice, too

Another Election Day has come and gone. In the wake of recent electoral contests, the media will dutifully fill airtime, page-space and internet bandwidth telling stories about voter turnout. Such stories are told in the context of what percentage of eligible voters turned out to the polls and participated. And we are conditioned to believe this version of the story, that voter turnout is always somewhere less than 100 percent.

This way of thinking disenfranchises a huge swath of the population and enables generally unpopular politicians to sail to victory with only 20-25 percent of the total population supporting them. What we forget in counting voters is that non-voting is a choice too — a choice that says, “none of the above” and stays home. Sadly, these votes are never counted in any election.

The next time you see an overwrought, hand-wringing story about voter turnout, don’t join the collective knee-jerk reaction to shame such people. Ask instead why we keep running such unattractive candidates that repel such people from the polls out of sheer disgust. Perhaps politics can be fixed by finally counting non-voters’ votes as part of the official tally … and assigning real world electoral implications to these votes.

Matthew Rothchild

Marion