Your masters want you to vote because that gives them legitimacy. The few people who vote the less legitimate their rules appears to be. This is why wonderful bastions of democracy like Australia and North Korea make voting mandatory. So when the number of voters drops dramatically the rulers get worried. Here in Minnesota the rulers noticed that, in particular, St. Cloud experienced a dramatic drop in the number of voters between the last presidential election and 2014’s election and the Minnesota Secretary of State wants answers:
In St. Cloud’s Ward 1 Precinct 1, which includes a large portion of St. Cloud State University, 1,100 voters showed up to cast a vote in the 2012 presidential election.
Two years later, in the 2014 election, that number fell by more than half, to just 343 votes.
A decline in voter turnout during midterm elections isn’t new, but that plunge was even steeper than usual, and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon wants to know why. Is it a mechanical problem of voter access to the polls? Or disillusionment about the political process itself?
I can tell you that the drop in voter participation isn’t due to mechanical problems or access to polling places. People are just wising up. More of them are realizing that they are going to get fucked no matter who gets elected. Going to the polls takes time. Why would you waste valuable drinking time traveling across town, standing in line, and filling in ovals on a piece of paper? That time could be more productively used by sleeping in, clipping your fingernails, or drinking beer.
Voter participation is only going to continue to drop as people wake up to the fact that being under the boot of another person isn’t ideal. As voter participation goes down the rulers will try to develop schemes to encourage people to go to the polls. These schemes may include raffles for prices, coupons for local businesses, or laws fining people for not going to the polls. Our politicians are jealous of the fact that Kim Jong-un was elected by 100% of his population and want the same claim of legitimacy.