Remember to vote today

State & Local elections today! Not many people use their power to vote in off-year elections. Your vote will have a greater impact on our society.

If you need to talk to a representative in the future, they will consider how much attention to give you based on your voting record (that you are active in voting, not whom you cast your ballot). Give them reason to hear you.

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There are 7 items on the ballot for TX state constitutional amendments. I voted this morning.

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Candidates who go door to door also use the lists of people who have voted in prior elections to determine which doors they go knock on. If you want to learn which local candidates go door to door seeking your vote, or your input on your vision of the position they are seeking, you need to be a regular voter. Though most candidates for local races will return email, phone calls, etc to anyone in district that poses a well stated question.

I will also add, that if you decide to run for elected office at some point in the future, and you participate in any kind of debate, it is likely that one of the questions will be along the lines of: I see that in the last 10 years where there have been X elections in this county, you only voted in Y. Please explain how we can take you seriously as a candidate now, given your weak history of participation in our government.

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Here is a possible answer and comments. I ran across this today and think it might be a good read for all interested:

Disastorino

Elections are the only place where marketers try to get fewer people to buy what’s being sold.

In many elections in the US, fewer than half the population votes. Which means, of course, that in most elections, not only doesn’t the winner get a majority, the winner wasn’t even chosen by a majority of the majority. We make it worse with gerrymandering and arcane vote counting.

It turns out that depressing voter turnout is a shortcut for the selfish political marketer. It’s easier to get your opponent’s supporters to become disgusted enough to stay home than it is to actually encourage people to proactively vote for you.

When non-electoral marketers try to learn from political examples, we get confused by all of this. The fact that it’s a one-shot event, that a bare majority is the goal (most marketing doesn’t have to win a majority, it merely needs to matter to enough people) and that decreasing turnout is a valid strategy all add up to make politics a special case.

Blue Bottle Coffee doesn’t succeed against Starbucks by getting people to not drink coffee at all. Nor do they need to sell more than half the coffee sold. All that a non-political marketer needs to do is find enough raving fans. If politicians learned this lesson, I think we’d all be better off.

It’s not an accident we’re disgusted. Politicians spend billions of marketing dollars to create the belief that voting is something that’s better to avoid.

They teach us that it’s not a responsibility we want to take.

They make it feel like a hassle.

They don’t invest in making it a chance to build community and connection.

In short, it’s more like giving blood and less like going to a Super Bowl party.

Too often the incumbents are liked by a minority, respected by an even smaller group and particularly bad at the job. And if many of the registered voters turned out, each would lose in a heartbeat.

The solution is simple, fast and cheap. Show up and vote. Every time.

Once politicians realize that we’re immune to their cynical tricks, they’ll stop using them.

Show up and vote. It’ll make a difference.

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I agree with basic gist and tenor of the article. But:

The problem is, we are not immune. At all. The fact that they work s demonstrated by general success of methods employed that produce low voter turnout.

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That’s because people are not aware that they have been raised to be a ‘sheeple’. But once they wake up, then continuing to being a ‘sheeple’ is a personal choice. At that point, the negative campaigning doesn’t work anymore unless a person uses it as an excuse for a personal character flaw.

Bottom line is a person just needs to get pissed off at these people and make a choice. That was and is the Trump phenomenon that’s growing.

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Of course they are. Most of them. You understand this because:

There. Now you’re talking sense.

Agreed. But that take energy, motivation, interest in things beyond one’s day-to-day needs and selfish interests. Oops…low voter turnout again. So sorry…

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Turnout was 5% – pathetic.

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Wouldn’t it would be interesting to see how many residents in each district are eligible to vote and how many are not?

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Just curious if you mean “residents” or “occupants”?
What factors cause ineligibility to vote (truly ignorant, here)?
EDIT: slightly less ignorant, if this site is accurate, but some of this I already “knew”.
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Who-Cant-Vote-in-the-U.S.-Elections-20160218-0032.html

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Residents = long term occupants? :smiley:

It seems like there are many residents (legal or otherwise) that aren’t citizens, and many despite being qualified to apply for citizenship, either have not or refuse to do so but are the first to complain against (insert issue here) matters.

Same as how many of protesters we see on tv against (whatever issue) are citizens and how many are not?
They are noisy, but do they have the right to dictate(indirectly via voting) change of policy or are politicians just being “noise barraged” into submission(if such a thing does happen) by residents that don’t have the right to do so because the politicians want to stay in office?

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One thing that surprised me is how many people have moved since the last election and either not registered, or at least no longer in the same county. Working from the list of registered voters, with history of voting, you get a surprising number of people answering the door who have lived there one or two years, that either aren’t registered, or aren’t eligible to vote.

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Interesting questions. To speak to the “noise barrage”:
I find the uptrend in treating “the Internet/blogs/social media” as if it has complete validity of the utmost concern. Family Guy made a joke once (I think the episode was PTV, but cannot find this clip), with regard to the FCC, if memory serves, that they “received 5 calls from offended people, and as you know, for each call received, that represents 1 MILLION VIEWERS”. This is how the “Internet/social media/blog” phenomenon feels to me. We have begun to equate 10,000 “screaming {site of choice} users” with 100,000 (or more) real screaming people, when I suspect:
there’s actually only 5,000 unique users screaming on {site of choice}; maybe less, and that it does NOT scale out to the population because you have a very tiny “throat swab” sampling of folks in the {site of choice} petri.
Protests, sadly, are being done similarly: bus in some “protesters”; make the numbers look as big as possible, especially on the Internet; claim it’s a “grass roots” protest…

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Trump winning proved your theory correct.

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voting is a trap
a false choice …
ur system iz broken and u still give it credence …
good luck ,hope u dont get ur delusional lil heart broken

A contrary view is that the fewer people who vote, the more my vote counts. I feel that I make better decisions than the average person (who doesn’t feel this way?) so why should I try to dilute my vote with other people who may not make the same good decisions that I would?

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u on to something …
why cant we just vote electronically on issues …
why this old silly system …

Warning: lots of words:
https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/internet-voting/vote-online/

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i read it all
it will happen sooner or later , and when it do ,u ask ur self ,why not sooner .

"The sum of all of these considerations is simple. The security, privacy, and transparency requirements for online voting are much more complex and stringent than they are for E-Commerce transactions. "---- absolutely immaterial and false …

I will contend that we currently have enough issues with voter fraud; “Internet” voting would only make that worse.
What do you propose to fix “ur [sic] broken system” (which I guess means you do not consider it to be “our” broken system)?

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