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!
I'd love to know the results if we re-ran our elections on that basis, but I expect that world would be terrifyingly different than the one we live in, in ways you and I can't even predict.
But across the mass of people, even really smart people, you'd be shocked how many people forget what day election day is. I spend much of election week reminding personal friends to vote (for local candidates), and a decent number of them forget what day it was and didn't schedule it in.
I'm not sure it'd be that different, actually. I mean if only 30% voted, these people wouldn't be some Martians - they'd be somebody's peers, friends, coworkers, relatives, etc. - so they'd be part of the same culture. If you're an academia and everybody around votes Democrat, and some of them would be too hang over to vote, the rest would still vote Democrat. If you're in rural Tennessee and everybody around votes Republican, and you just forget to vote - the rest would vote Republican anyway. Sure, some patterns may shift here and there, but I suspect it won't be that different even if much less people voted than do now.
But that's assuming that the knowledge of politics is evenly and randomly distributed across other factors and identities. It isn't. You'd have far more rich educated voters and far fewer poor and elderly voters. Do red tribe and blue tribe coalitions even make sense once you disenfranchise major portions of each base?
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