One Way to Increase The Voting Turnout
By: Mariah Ramsay
The American people is made up of different people with a wide variety of backgrounds and personal beliefs. Some people are naturally drawn to politics, others could care less. Some people argue that voting is a civic duty and everyone should feel they have to vote. That statement is often disagreed with. Whatever the opinions that a person on voting, nobody has ever complained of too many people voting. There have in the past, and many times today, that people are worried about the steady decrease of people in America voting. The most important question being: How can we increase the number of people voting, specifically in smaller communities?
Age is a point that gets brought up, when talking about the increase and decreasing number of voters, quite often. This is a very important point to bring up seeing as you have to be a specific age or older in order to vote.
This represents the people that argue over which age groups are voting and which aren’t. The voting predictions are usually linear until a certain age. Then, the U-shape starts taking form. This just means that as you get older you’re more likely to vote, but after a specific age you start become less and less likely to vote.
There are too many reasons why certain people aren’t voting. We can’t simply say it’s solely because of one of them. Another thing that we have to keep in mind is that not all of these problems are in our control. I highly doubt that we would ever have 100% of our voting population actually participate. We don’t want everyone to vote just because. We want people to think about it and make the decisions they actually want to make. Henry Milner, the author of The internet generation: engaged citizens or political dropouts, says: “If merely boosting turnout were our objective, we would ignore civic education in favor of compulsory
“Some commentators see the relationship as being essentially linear: as age increases, so the likelihood of turnout increases, at least until the ‘age of infirmity’. Others believe that the age of infirmity has greater weight, and hence have hypothesised a U-shaped relationship, with likelihood of turnout increasing throughout middle-age, and then declining amongst the elderly. The reason for lower turnout amongst the very elderly is clearly related to the ability to go to the polling station. “ (Evans, 152-153)