Why Millions Of Americans Don’t Vote

Then in 2012, he decided not to bother casting a second ballot for Obama. It wasn’t that he had soured on the president — he just didn’t think it was necessary. “He’s already in office … [so] I kinda figured he didn’t need my help,” Brown said. He was willing to take the time out of his day to cast his vote, but he didn’t think it would have an impact on the outcome. “I know it’s kind of a stupid thought, but I feel like one missed vote isn’t going to change anything.”.

“I’m not even really keen on Biden,” Brown said. “It’s more so that Trump is bringing racist rhetoric out of a lot of people.” Those kinds of comments are “really hurtful to me, disrespectful to me,” he said. So he’s decided to vote again this year: “This way, if [Biden] does lose the election, I can’t say that it was my fault because I didn’t vote.”.

Every election, millions of Americans go through a similar thought process and, it turns out, lots of people feel like Brown: They think voting doesn’t matter or isn’t worth their time..

In any given election, between 35 and 60 percent of eligible voters don’t cast a ballot. It’s not that hard to understand why. Our system doesn’t make it particularly easy to vote, and the decision to carve out a few hours to cast a ballot requires a sense of motivation that’s hard for some Americans to muster every two or four years — enthusiasm about the candidates, belief in the importance of voting itself, a sense that anything can change as the result of a single vote. “I guess I just don’t think that one person’s vote can swing an election,” said Jon Anderson, who won’t be voting for president this year because of moral objections to both candidates..

But who does — and doesn’t — vote is complex. Most Americans don’t fall neatly into any one category. Instead, as we found in our new poll with Ipsos, most are like Brown. They vote inconsistently, or at moments when they feel like their vote has a chance to make a difference, or when the stakes of not voting are just too high, which is how many Americans describe this upcoming election..

Of the 8,000-plus people we polled, we were able to match nearly 6,000 to their voting history. We analyzed the views of the respondents in that slightly smaller group, and found that they fell into three broad groups: 1) people who almost always vote; 2) people who sometimes vote; and 3) people who rarely or never vote.

People who sometimes vote were a plurality of the group (44 percent), while 31 percent nearly always cast a ballot and just 25 percent almost never vote.

And as the chart below shows, there weren’t huge differences between people who vote almost all the time and those who vote less consistently.

Many of the people we spoke with described their decision to vote as very personal, boiling down to the specific candidates, their own ability to navigate the electoral system that year, or whether they thought their vote would matter.

Of the three groups of voters we identified, those voters who only vote some of the time were actually the likeliest to report having stood in line for more than an hour; they were also likelier than those who vote more regularly to say they couldn’t get off work to vote.

This year, some of these occasional voters are also dealing with pandemic-specific challenges that could make voting less of a priority.

For instance, people who vote more irregularly are a little more likely than those who almost always vote to have lost a job in the past year (13 percent vs. 10 percent) or to have worried about expenses (21 percent vs. 16 percent), although those who almost never vote are even likelier than those who sometimes vote to have reported these experiences.

Adam Sanchez, 27, isn’t sure if he’s voting this year, in part because he doesn’t want to risk his health by voting in person, but also because he doesn’t trust mail-in ballots.

“The last time I tried to vote by mail, it didn’t get counted — it was too late,” he said.

On the whole, though, those who don’t vote as frequently didn’t view methods of voting — like in-person voting or mail-in ballots — all that differently than people who always vote.

About 24 percent of Black respondents said that they had to stand in line for more than an hour while voting, and Hispanic respondents were more likely to say they had trouble accessing the polling place or couldn’t get off work in time to vote.

Every year, people make it sound like it's doomsday all over.

“I’m going to have to take time off work to go get in line, because my job doesn’t give me time off to vote,” she said, adding that she’s had to wait five or six hours in past elections.

Fifty-one percent of respondents thought that making Election Day a national holiday would allow more people to cast a ballot.

“I genuinely feel like my vote doesn’t matter,” she said.

In the survey, we asked voters who have missed at least one national election — which included some people who almost always vote — why they didn’t cast a ballot.

“I’m ashamed to say it, but like a lot of people, I said, ‘My vote doesn’t count.’ … Generally what the politicians do doesn’t affect me,’” he said.

Similarly, people who vote sometimes (78 percent) or rarely (60 percent) are much less likely than voters who vote almost all of the time (85 percent) to say that there are people in politics who look like them — which could in turn make it harder to trust or identify with the candidates running for office.

Another hurdle for Martinez were politicians and the political parties, which he described as “not for the people.” Many of the other survey respondents felt similarly: A substantial chunk of respondents said they don’t think either party wants people like them to vote.

(Twenty-three percent said this of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans.) Black and Hispanic people were especially likely to say the Republicans don’t want people like them to vote: Fifty-four percent of Black respondents and 35 percent of Hispanic respondents agreed with this statement, compared to just 26 percent of white respondents.

That perception may be turning off some voters who might otherwise be more likely to cast a ballot.

“Latinos, brown people and Black people don’t vote.

Like other voters in relatively noncompetitive states, she was skeptical that her vote can make a difference in Virginia, where she’s currently a graduate student.

And if that happens, it could be due in large part to the fact that a lot of people who vote only sometimes cast a ballot this year.

According to our survey, 82 percent of these voters are following the 2020 election somewhat or very closely, and 93 percent are planning to vote in 2020 — very close to the share of those who say they always vote (97 percent).

A much smaller but still non-negligible share of nonvoters (51 percent) also say they’re planning to vote this year.

(Of course, many people who say they will vote don’t end up casting a ballot.).

However, those who rarely vote were the likeliest to say the election doesn’t matter.

That’s true of voters of all political leanings, not just people like Robey who dislike Trump.

In interviews and the survey, we found, time and again, an increased sense of urgency to vote among less-frequent voters.

Take someone like Thomas Jones, 56, who didn’t vote in 2016 but plans to cast his ballot for Biden this year.

“There are too many people dying to joke about something like that.” But despite his support for Biden, Jones didn’t have much enthusiasm for the Democratic Party.