If you’re an American voter or a voting eligible American that has yet to register or exercise that right, you should be feeling somewhat salty about the fact that India’s election is bigger than ours. That’s right: we might think we’re something with our billion plus dollar presidential campaigns, but India gets gold medals for voter turnout. The world’s largest election is underway over five days to accommodate over 815 million voters – on the first day alone, there was 74 percent turnout spread out over 935,000 polling stations.
Back in the United States, we’re still squabbling over Voter IDs, early voting and absentee ballots. We can’t make up our mind what model of electronic voting machine we should use nor have we completely worked out digital bugs in those machines to a point where we can safely assume every election is secure. And our politics are increasingly defined by those with enough money to waste: Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson spent $40 million in the 2012 cycle, dwarfing contributions from the bottom 98 percent. The top “.000063 percent” as The Nation’s Ari Berman termed it dominate the resources needed to execute the campaigns.
In Afghanistan, 60 percent of the perpetually shit-holed country’s 12 million eligible voters turned out for presidential and provincial elections – and that’s mad high considering the constant threat of Taliban extremists daring to, literally, blow it all up. Back here, we got twisted in our britches over a few harmless and unarmed Black Panther wannabes standing outside a Northeast Philly polling precinct – where voter turnout wasn’t all that great, anyway.
Indonesia’s recent national legislative elections garnered a 70 percent turnout rate out of 187 million registered voters. France’s critical municipal elections were considered historically low – but, at 62 percent and enough to force President Francoise Hollande into pink-slipping his prime minister.
We should be jealous. Most of the countries mentioned above aren’t exactly model democracies – the world’s largest election typically posts armed paramilitary guards at its polling stations after years of political violence. But, 815 million of the country’s 1.2 billion people – close to 70 percent of the population – still find the time and courage to vote.
Over 40 percent of Afghanistan’s population of 30 million is registered to vote, despite living in a country that faces a terribly uncertain future. Over 75 percent of Indonesia’s population of 247 million is registered to vote in a wobbly emerging Asian economy still going through disruptive growing pains. And 66 percent of France’s population of 66 million is registered to vote in a country with a 12 percent official unemployment rate and a youth jobless rate hovering at 25 percent.
In the world’s original democracy, only 57 percent of the U.S. population (now at 315 million) is registered to vote – but, over 76 percent of the population is actually eligible to vote. And voter registration in 2012 was actually down 4 percent even as the U.S. population grew almost 4 percent.
In many ways, the voter turnout numbers in the U.S. aren’t as spectacular as some of the numbers above given our status as OG of established democracies and our extremely stable political environment.
We might be staging tea party uprisings, but real talk: folks aren’t getting shot or blown up at the polling station. Republicans incessantly whine about voter fraud as if it’s an epidemic, and I’m sure folks who happen to own a TV in Kabul are probably watching our bullshit in disbelief.
Of course, we’ve got battle scars to brag about. Democracy ain’t easy, should Big Daddy Kane be looking for a comeback. There was one time where our government on the state, local and federal level actively and rather violently prevented people of color from pulling a vote machine level, but our parents, grandparents and parents before them shed tons of blood, sweat and tears to make sure we didn’t have to go through that anymore.
In essence, our voter turnout numbers are a bit of a joke – when compared to places like Afghanistan … which we’re in the process of “rebuilding.” As we head into the 2014 Congressional midterms, we’re lucky if we get 45 percent since turnout in the 2002, 2006 and 2010 midterms was barely at 40 percent. Yet, the lot of us get Twitter hashtagging raving ballistic when rednecks we can’t stand take over Congress.
And as historic as the past two presidential cycles have been, the fact we hit over 60 percent in turnout for 2008 seemed like an anomaly – we couldn’t even hit that threshold in 2012.
Yet, years later, we’ve lost as many voters as we gained people living here.
Granted, there are any number of valid reasons why many of us won’t turnout. That Republican-dominated state legislatures continue pushing creative ways to limit access to polls aggravates the situation. India can hold an election for five days but we don’t want to let go of holding it in one day – and on a work-day at that. We can’t agree on what type of voting machine we want to use nor can we promise if their fully secure. Voting process standards are all over the place, so rather than one national standard we seem pleased with about fifty shades of it.
That less than 1 percent of the population dominates policymaking at the expense of the nearly 25 percent that are underemployed can be discouraging. But, it’s not like Adelson and the Wall Street capitalists are standing guard at the polling stations with guns to your head. It could be as worse as the chance you could be the victim of a bomb-strapped extremist in Afghanistan or Egypt attempting to derail an election. Stepping away from it all for a moment, we actually have it quite good compared to a number of other places. Yet, their turnout is higher than ours. What’s the deal with us?