Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
So everybody around is now like "please vote, please vote". I'd like to challenge that. I'll start with the observation that while obviously not everybody votes who has the right to, we don't exactly have a crisis level of participation here, we have about 2/3 of voters turn out. Which isn't that bad, it's not like a tiny group of people are deciding for the whole country.
Now, if somebody is so disinterested in politics - or so lazy, or disappointed, or uninformed - that they don't want to vote, why should any effort be spent on convincing them? Their vote probably would not be well thought out, and they would probably fail to accurately appreciate the consequences of their choices. Best case they'd vote at random, worst case they'd follow the first demagogue or pretty face they encounter. I mean, if you work for your local neighborhood demagogue, it's exactly what you want I guess, but why anybody else would support such an effort? I'd rather say the exact opposite - please don't vote unless you understand what it is about and what are you voting for - in which case you probably don't need anybody else to tell you what to do anyway!
Desire to vote and political knowledge are spectrums and, I'd assume, correlated. Everyone above a certain level of desire to vote does so. Get-out-the-vote efforts lower the level. Thus I'd figure the resulting voters are not going to vote at random, because their level of political knowledge is better than that; you'd have to reach pretty amazing levels of turnout before you hit people with little enough knowledge to vote randomly or otherwise in a hideously misinformed fashion.
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