Business
In the United States, there are over 500,000 elected officials. In the overwhelming majority of elections, less than half of eligible voters participate, resulting in one of the lowest levels of voter engagement of any Western democracy. In this episode, Andrews asks and tries to answer: What can be done to increase turnout for elections conducted every year in the U.S.? Can the security risks of implementing online voting be overcome? If online voting did become available in the United States, what might it look like? Which companies would be the winners? Sponsored by: SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. They also have a feature called BlackHole where you can relegate a sender’s messages to obscurity. For Predicting Our Future listeners, visit sanebox.com/future and receive an extra $25 credit on top of their two-week free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Improving Voter Turnout for 500,000 Elections On November 2nd, 2016, I went to my local polling station in Brooklyn and voted, even though I knew my vote wouldn’t really count. In New York, it’s long been a foregone conclusion that the state would vote for Hillary Clinton for President, and where I live in Brooklyn, my congressional district is so overwhelmingly Democratic that there wasn’t a one in a million chance that the Republican candidate would win. Still, I woke up early and walked the few blocks to the local school to vote. You wouldn’t believe the line. It was a 90 minute wait to vote. I stayed, but many people didn’t. And I didn’t feel particularly encouraged doing my civic responsibility in voting. When the results were counted later that night, Hillary won New York, won the popular vote, and lost the presidency. What about my civic responsibility to participate in all the other elections that I was eligible to vote for? On a New York City ballot, depending on the year, you can find candidates for the following public offices: President and Vice President of the United States United States Senators Members of the House of Representatives Governor and Lieutenant Governor of New York State State Attorney General State Comptroller State Senators State Assembly Mayor of New York City Public Advocate City Comptroller Borough Presidents City Council Members District Attorneys Surrogate Judges State Supreme Court Judges Civil Court Judges I think I’m significantly more involved politically than the average person, and I have to admit that I could not name all of the people who fill these positions and represent me. And if voting for the President felt so useless and required so much time, I began to think about how much time I or anyone else would devote to all of these other positions, none of which carry the import, visibility, and glamor of the presidency. Most people must subconsciously perform some type of equation in their heads: importance of office times likelihood my vote counts times the amount of effort involved is equal to some unquantifiable feeling that one should or should not vote. Local Elections: A Better Place To Start In the 2016 presidential election, the likelihood of my vote counting in the state of New York was small, and the work -- not just measured by the time standing in line, but by the effort to familiarize oneself with all the candidates on the ballot -- was high, so you would expect it to depress turnout. In an off-presidential election year like 2010, 2014, or 2018, we know from experience that voter turnout is even lower than it is during a presidential year. In 2014, less than 40% of the electorate voted in the November congressional races. How many opportunities does a voter have to be apathetic?