Voting is an interesting behavior, currently what sparked my interest in understand voting better was an article saying that 40% of the people eligible to vote wont be voting this election. Let me quote from the article on the Daily KOS entitled:

90 Million Voters Will Not Vote: 18 Reasons They Should

There are 90 million voters, who are not going to vote in this November’s national elections for one reason or another. Some are fed up with the current two party system. Some think that politics has become too dirty, and they don’t want to be involved. Some say that all the candidates are the same, some say that their vote doesn’t mean anything, and some think that politics doesn’t concern or affect them.

90 million people is a significant number of people. According to current estimates there are 311,591,917 people living in the USA, 90 million people. That’s roughly 28% of our total population.

Its really to easy to say that such a significant portion of our population of eligible voters are not voting because they are lazy, apathetic, or stupid or idiots. If 40% of my organs failed, or my 40% brain was injured in accident, I would be I imagine in critical condition. But yet that same sort of panic, that same sort of worry isn’t present when we look at the titanic amount of people who don’t vote.

Accurate accessing democracy?

When I think of the voting in this country I think of cancer. Why because whenever we eat or feed ourselves we are feeding that cancer at the same time. If we do not take a moment to access what is going wrong then we are feeding the very thing that is harming us.

I proposed in the previous post that votes can be bought as evidenced by the fact that politicians do not have to disclose what people (corporations are people now). Can a candidate win votes if is not raising as much money as his opponent? If wall street executive, and oil corporations give hundred of millions of dollars to a campaign will the candidate sign into legislation laws to clean up and regulate Wall Street or promote clean legislation?

Aim of the series

The aim of this series is to look at voting, it’s strange history, and come up with some reasons why it has not been effective. I say its not effective because we are currently facing:

Housing Crisis
Student Debt Crisis
Credit Card Debt Crisis
Environmental Climate Crisis
Healthcare in In Crisis
Foreign Policy Crisis
Banking Crisis

I am pretty sure no one voted for all these crises and then the other things that come with that. I find

What this series isn’t

This series is NOT a call for anarchy or anything question. It is simple a question of present and past actions and patterns in voting that can shed light on what is actually happening. I have shared my opinion with you and it is just that a personal opinion. I don’t mind if people don’t take it seriously or find it dumb don’t agree, it is important to discuss things and save the shouting matching for the pundits on TV and the free clinic waiting room.

I try to present facts historical facts as much as possible and not just give you my opinion but what facts lead me to my opinion, so that we can discuss things

Some Facts:

(How you choose to interpret them are your own business)

These facts come from Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States from a section on the Reagan Presidency. I choose the Reagan presidency mainly because some consider it the start of the modern day republican party

A Harris/Harvard School of Public Health poll of 1989 showed that most Americans (61 percent) favored a Canadian-type health system, in which the government was the single payer to doctors and hospitals, bypassing the insurance companies, and offering universal medical coverage to everyone. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican party adopted that as its program, although both insisted they wanted to “reform” the health system.

A survey by the Gordon Black Corporation for the National Press Club in 1992 found that 59 percent of all voters wanted a 50 percent cut in defense spending in five years. Neither of the major parties was willing to make major cuts in the military budget.

How the public felt about government aid to the poor seemed to depend on how the question was put. Both parties, and the media, talked incessantly about the “welfare” system, that it was not working, and the word “welfare” became a signal for opposition. When people were asked (a New York Times/CBS News poll of 1992) if more money should he allocated to welfare, 23 percent said no. But when the same people were asked, should the government help the poor, 64 percent said yes.

Clearly, there was something amiss with a political system, supposed to be democratic, in which the desires of the voters were repeatedly ignored. They could be ignored with impunity so long as the political system was dominated by two parties, both tied to corporate wealth. An electorate forced to choose between Carter and Reagan, or Reagan and Mondale, or Bush and Dukakis could only despair (or decide not to vote) because neither candidate was capable of dealing with a fundamental economic illness whose roots were deeper than any single presidency.

That illness came from a fact which was almost never talked about: that the United States was a class society, in which I percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth, with an underclass of 30 to 40 million people living in poverty. The social programs of the sixties- Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, etc.-did not do much more than maintain the historic American maldistribution of resources.