They Don't Really Want You to Vote.

Low voter turnout is by design -- and leftists aren't the reason Dems lose.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash, edited in Photomosh by author.

As I logged into the Howard Brown Clinic’s Patient Portal to check in for my STI screening, I was greeted with a cheery reminder: Studies show that voters have better health outcomes than non-voters. Register to vote today using the Vote-ER platform!

Some copy from the Vot-ER site.

It was a funny message coming from an organization that for the last two years has done everything in its power to block organizing workers from voting to unionize, including retaliatory layoffs and the fostering of a quote “toxic culture” according to employees. These maneuvers were finally thwarted in May when workers at Howard Brown ratified a contract guaranteeing an average pay increase of 7%, health insurance for part-time employees, two weeks of paid leave for gender-affirming care procedures, and protections against layoffs.

It wasn’t just “voting” for the union that secured employees these benefits, of course. When clinic executives repeatedly walked away from the negotiation table, workers at Howard Brown went on multiple days-long strikes, with over 400 employees picketing outside of clinic and resale shop locations and grinding business as usual to a halt. It was collective, economically disruptive activity that secured Howard Brown employees the resources they needed to safeguard their own health.

Vote for your health. It’s a pretty typical message to be hearing now, at the terminal stage of the election, in what we can only dream will be the terminal phase of neoliberal democracy.

After my appointment (no bacterial vaginosis this time guys, good news!), I stepped out from the Howard Brown clinic onto Halsted Street to see the drag club Hydrate wrapped in a banner bearing the faces of several RuPaul’s Drag Race stars, admonishing me “You Betta Vote!”

For Kamala Harris, presumably, and for the sake of matters like transgender rights and the environment, though neither RuPaul nor Kamala are exactly known for being champions of those causes.

Walking down Halsted, I saw big gay reminders to vote outside of Progress, a bar criticized in 2019 for instituting a “no rap music” policy, and Beatnix, a thrift store that in the same year came under fire for selling Confederate flag vests and calling the police on customers who complained. On the walls of the Center on Halsted, beloved queer community center once patrolled by a head security officer who was suspended from the Chicago Police Department for brutalizing a Black bouncer and calling him the n-word, I also saw banners admonishing me to vote for the first Black and Asian female President.

All along Northhalsted there are Kamala Harris banners, posters, stickers, crop tops, and mugs in Progress pride rainbow and Charli XCX neon, the illusion of a choice championed by a chorus of wealthy white gay business owners’ voices, gradually building into a roar telling me to just stop holding my nose and take it already, let this brat-green coconut-flavored context-pilled rainbow sprinkled confectionary of a giardia-infected turd slide down my throat.

And I’d just finished a round of antibiotics!

Photo by Anastasiia Gudantova on Unsplash, edited in Photomosh by author.

Voters don’t live longer because they vote. They do because of correlations — voters tend to come from wealthier backgrounds, and enjoy better access to fresh food and quality hospitals. They are more likely to be highly educated, to grow up in houses filled with books, and be taught by parents about the supposed virtue of delaying gratification.

These children grow into adults who earn a high wage doing labor that doesn’t not dampen their brows, and live in homes that they own, free from lead-tainted water and paint. All these privileged streams of influence flow downward, creating an individual who perceives life to be essentially fair and the world oriented around a set of moral rules — a person who lives a long time, and lives well, a person who believes that this nation is something worth defending, a person who happily votes.

Admonishing the average Howard Brown patient — who is queer, impoverished, and has limited healthcare access— to vote for the sake of their health is to confuse the direction of cause and effect. It’s like prescribing a furry with ketamine in hopes it will turn them into a horse.

Howard Brown’s chirpy reminders to vote are less about actually safeguarding their patients’ health, and more about imbuing them with an oversized sense of personal responsibility. Telling individuals in dyed-blue states that we better vote, whether it’s to stay alive or to “save democracy,” is instructing us to take control of a matter over which we have statistically zero influence, so that if something bad happens, we will blame ourselves. If Kamala loses, we’re supposed to feel ashamed for somehow being both too apathetic to get to the polls, and too perfectionistic to do the ‘pragmatic’ thing and elect a politician who has offered no concession to us.

It’s true that America has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the industrialized world, with only 62% of eligible adults turning up to the polls on a good year, and about 50% on a typical one. But if we really dive into the social science data, we can see that non-voters aren’t a bunch of nihilistic commie layabouts who’d prefer to die in a bridge collapse or of an untreated listeria infection than vote for someone who isn’t Vladimir Lenin. No, if we really study it carefully, we can see that the American electoral system has a series of unique features that easily account for why we find voting more cumbersome, confusing, and unrewarding than almost any other voters in the world.

Let’s take a look at the many reasons why Americans don’t vote:

1. We Have the Most Frequent Elections of Any Country

Most other democratic countries only hold major elections once every four or five years, with the occasional local election in between. This is in sharp contrast with the U.S., where we have some smattering of primaries, regional elections, state elections, ballot measures, midterm elections, and national elections basically every single year, often multiple times per year. We have elections more frequently than any other nation in the world — but just as swallowing mountains of vitamin C tablets doesn’t guarantee better health, voting more and harder hasn’t given us more democracy.

2. We Don’t Make Election Day a Holiday

The United States also does far less than most other democracies to facilitate its voters getting to the polls. In 22 countries, voting is legally mandated, and turnout is consequently very high; most countries instead make election day a national holiday, or hold elections on weekends. The United States, in contrast, typically holds elections on weekdays, during work hours, with minimal legal protections for employees whose only option to vote is on the clock.

3. We Make Registration as Hard as Possible

From Denmark, to Sweden, to Iceland, Belgium, and Iraq, all eligible voters in most democracies are automatically registered to vote upon reaching legal adulthood. Voting is typically regarded as a rite of passage one takes part in alongside their classmates and neighbors, made part of the natural flow of the country’s bureaucratic processes.

In the United States, in contrast, voter registration is a process that the individual must seek out — or more recently, be goaded into by their doctor. Here voting is not a communal event, it’s a personal choice, and failing to make the correct choice at the correct time can be penalized. In most other countries, there are no restrictions on when a voter can register, but in much of the United States, registering too early can mean you get stricken from the voter rolls by the time the election rolls around, and registering too late means you’re barred from voting at all.

4. We Make Voters Re-Register Far Too Often

In countries like Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, voter registration updates automatically when a person moves. In the United State, any time a person changes addresses they must go out of their way to register to vote all over again. This policy disadvantages poorer and younger voters, who move frequently because of job and schooling changes, or landlords who have decided to farm black mold colonies in their kitchens.

Even if a voter does not change their address, in the United States it’s quite common for their registrations to be removed anyway— due to name changes, marriages, data breaches, or simply because the voter rolls from the previous election year have been purged to “prevent fraud” (read: eliminate Black, brown, poor, and left-leaning members from the electorate).

5. We Limit Access to Polling Places & Mail-in Ballots

In many countries, voters can show up to any number of polling places on election day, and showing identification is not always necessary. Here in the United States, the ability to vote is typically restricted to a single polling place. Voter ID laws have been used since before the Jim Crow era to make political participation more difficult for Black, brown, and impoverished voters, as well as for those for whom English is not their first language. Early and absentee voting options are also pretty firmly restricted. About a quarter of democracies worldwide rely on mail-in ballots to make voting more accessible for everyone; here, a mail-in ballot must be requested in advance.

All of these structural barriers help explain why just over 50% of non-voters in the United States are people of color, and a majority of non-voters have been repeatedly found to be impoverished and otherwise marginalized. But these populations don’t only feel excluded from the political process on a practical level: they also report feeling completely unrepresented by the available political options.

6. We Have the Longest, Most Expensive Campaign Seasons

Americans have some of the longest campaign seasons in the world, with Presidential elections lasting about 565 days on average. For reference, the UK’s campaign season is 139 days, Mexico’s is 147, and Canada’s is just 50. We also do not have publicly funded campaigns: our politicians rely upon donors almost entirely.

Because our elections are so frequent and our campaigns are so long and expensive, many American elected officials are in a nearly constant state of fundraising and campaigning. When you take into account the time devoted to organizing rallies, meeting with donors, courting lobbyists, knocking on doors, recording advertisements, and traveling the campaign trail, most federally elected politicians spend more time trying to win their seat than actually doing their jobs.

Imagine how much work you’d get done if you had to interview for your job every day. And now imagine that the person actually paying your wage didn’t want you to do that job at all:

7. Our Elected Officials Do Very Little

Elected officials who spend the majority of their hours campaigning and courting donors don’t have much time to get work done. Nor do they have much incentive to — in practice, their role is to represent the large corporations, weapons manufacturers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and investors who pay their bills, and serve as a stopgap when the public’s demands run afoul of those groups’ interests.

Perhaps that is why, as campaign seasons have gotten longer and more expensive and income inequality has grown more stark, our elected officials have become lean-out quiet quitters of historic proportions. The 118th Congress has so far been the least productive session on record, with only 82 laws having been passed in last two years out of the over 11,000 brought to the floor.

The Biden Administration has moved at a similarly glacial pace; aside from leaping for the phone when Israel calls requesting checking account transfers every two or three weeks, the executive-in-chief has done little but fumble at student loan relief and abortion protections, and bandied about banning TikTok.

The average age of American elected officials has been on a steady rise for some time now, with the obvious senility of figures like Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Diane Feinstein serving as the most obvious markers of the government’s stagnancy. Carting around a confused, ailing elderly person’s body around the halls of power like a decommissioned animatronic requires a depth of indifference to human suffering that few of us outside Washington can fathom. But more than that, it reflects a desperation for both parties to cling to what sources of influence and wealth they have. These aged figures are/were reliable simps for Blackstone, General Dynamics, Disney, and AIPAC, and their loyalty is worth far more than their cognitive capacity, or legislative productivity. Their job, in a very real sense, is to not do their job, and a beating-heart cadaver can do that just fine.

This leads us to feature #8:

8. Public Opinion Has Zero Influence on Policy

A study published by political scientists Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page out of Cambridge University Press found that “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The study authors examined over 1,700 policies passed over a period of 20 years, then examined national public opinion surveys from the same time period. Gilens & Page found that lawmakers’ policy decisions were strongly predicted by “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests,” whereas public opinion had statistically no relationship to which laws passed.

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This finding lines up with scholarship from lauded political scientist Phil Converse, who suggested decades ago that voters do not influence politicians’ stances. In fact, it is the messaging and priorities of politicians that appear to shape public opinion.

Today, polling shows that a majority of American voters support the mass deportation of immigrants — but they didn’t hold these xenophobic views even a couple of years ago. They have what Converse dubbed “nonattitudes” — when asked their stance on immigration, most voters pull a random smattering of recent news coverage and political stump speeches out of their minds on the fly, and present those talking points as their own sincerely-held views.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been arguing for mass deportations for years now, dubiously linking immigration to crime, and telling refugees not to come to the U.S., and so the average voter has followed suit. Joe Biden, let us not forget, has deported over 4.4 million people during his Presidency, the most since George W. Bush. Xenophobia has been the only political option on offer for quite some time, and many moderate voters have dug in. 

Meanwhile, a recent national poll suggested that Kamala Harris could win 5 additional percentage points in the election simply by supporting an arms embargo against Israel, potentially winning her the popular vote, yet she chooses not to adopt this wildly popular policy, because satisfying the Israel lobby is far more important to her than victory.

When the only options on the ballot are genocide and mass deportation or genocide and mass deportation but Lizzo and Taylor Swift are there and maybe one of the border patrol officers has a purse from Baggu, people with principles often decide to stay home. That’s especially true if they live in a decisively blue or red state, where their votes carry almost no weight. Which brings us to feature #9:

9. Most Votes Don’t Count

Thanks to the weighting of the electoral college, Presidential elections are decided by a handful of voters in a couple key battleground states. Reuters reports that the 2020 Presidential election was determined by just 43,000 voters in three key states: that’s less than 1% of all voters. If you voted outside of Georgia, Arizona, or Wisconsin in 2020, your vote had less influence on reality than Kegeling really fast right now would have on the barometric pressure.

If you’re in deeply blue territory, like those of us in Illinois, your electoral college votes will be going to Kamala no matter what you do. Admonishing a blue stater to go vote is like telling a person with moral OCD that the sun will only rise if they keep beating themselves with a scourge. It’s a purely symbolic, frankly superstitious act. All those RuPaul banners might as well tell us to lift our hands in the air and charge up a spirit bomb that’ll finally merc Trump for good.

Political "Polarization" Was Never the Problem

If you’re a voter in a red state, the news is even worse: your vote remains statistically next-to-useless, thanks to decades of voter suppression and racist redistricting, but whatever the worst conceivable outcome of the election could be, you’ll be blamed for it by the Dems. In states like Florida, Kentucky, and even the once-purple Ohio, the national Democratic Party has almost no ground game, and even in local elections, left-leaning voters often have to decide between die-hard conservatives lawmakers and centrist Democrats who avoid taking up the mantle of transgender rights or opposing genocide, so as not to alienate a supposedly “centrist” base.

That takes us to the final, damning feature of American politics that I’d like to highlight today:

10. Left-Leaning Perspectives Are Silenced

Democratic strategists often blame left-leaning voters for being too perfectionistic to support politicians with real “winning” potential. Every election season, the Dems claim electoral victory lies in the middle — that by appealing to a centrist voter who wants tax cuts, hates immigrants, supports all military endeavors, and is wary of trans people, they will win. Those of us who want social welfare, oppose genocide, and are at this very moment transgenderizing are told that we are anomalies, that there’s too few of us to ever make a real electoral difference.

As each election season draws to a close though, Democratic leadership changes their tune. Now it is the overly principled, picky leftists who lose the Dems their elections. We don’t turn out for liberals in high enough numbers, we criticize their candidates too much, we are so powerful and influential that by bowing out, we decide the fate of the country — but not so powerful that any politician ever offers anything to us. We’re expected to swallow that brat-colored turd, to accept tax cuts for billionaires and American troops on the ground in Palestine and a President who has waffled on gender-affirming care without complaint, and find our own way to convince ourselves it’s worth it.

It’s small wonder that so many of us ultimately prove incapable of such willful self-delusion.

Photo by Element5 on Unsplash, edited in Photomosh by author.

If you’re a left-leaning person in the United States, I just want to tell you that whatever happens after November 5th is not your fault. You’re told that if you don’t vote, you can’t complain, that your vote is your way to be heard— but it is literally impossible for your viewpoints to be expressed within the existing political system. It was not built to include you. You have zero power within it. In the service of appealing to moneyed interests and maintaining the largest and most deadly military in the world, your elected representatives will do everything in their power to not represent you.

In this, you are united with the vast majority of other human beings living in the country. And there is a power in us collectively realizing that. So please, take a step back from the election coverage, have a gander at the people around you, who are just as frustrated, despairing, and disaffected as you are, and let’s get ready to charge up our spirit bomb. One of the best predictors of long-term health outcomes, after all, is not voting — it’s the presence of community support.