I hear it all the time.
If you don’t vote, you’re lazy. You’re disengaging from reality. Your race, wealth, and status immunize you from the consequences of the election’s outcome. You are privileged.
With less than 50 days until the election, get-out-the-vote campaigns increasingly occupy every space of social interaction—from Instagram campaigns to classroom presentations to registration drives outside of coffee shops. The media and political class expect the general electorate to leave behind any hope of radical change and once again choose the “lesser of two evils.” Democrats issued a call to rally “like our lives depend” on this election.
A familiar image sweeps over our collective consciousness as we make sense of a sizable minority each election cycle: non-voters. Employing a monolithic framework, we characterize nonvoters as young, apathetic, selfish and thoughtless.
Most research often falls exclusively on “likely” voters who are perceived to make the most difference, thereby giving us relatively little information on those who don’t, or can’t, vote. Labeling all nonvoters as privileged strategically obscures the systemic barriers that undermine young, Black and brown, disabled and poor people. And, these are the populations disproportionately make up nonvoters—those we repeatedly proclaim as lazy, apathetic conformists.
Perhaps more importantly, this language masks the true causes of abstention by uplifting privilege discourse and denying agency to poor, nonwhite voters dissatisfied with the political system.
Not all nonvoters abstain from a place of privilege.
In 2016, about 40 percent of eligible voters abstained from voting. For perspective, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received 27.3 percent and 28.5 percent of votes respectively.
A Pew Research Center study of validated voters and voting-eligible nonvoters in 2016 overwhelmingly found that “nonvoters were more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent and nonwhite.” There were also large differences in income and education levels. 51 percent of nonvoters had, at most, a high school education compared with 30 percent of voters. 56 percent of nonvoters made less than $30,000 annually compared with 28 percent of voters. Those who made $75,000 or more in income made up a third of the voting electorate. A third of nonvoters were between the ages of 18-29.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin best exemplifies these demographic trends. Of the city’s 15 council districts, decline in turnout from 2012 to 2016 in the five poorest districts accounted for half of the overall decline in turnout citywide. “You must vote” language accordingly assumes nonvoters are rich, white and immune to changes in leadership, ignoring the truth in the demographics.
Moreover, the depiction of abstention as a byproduct of privilege distorts the real reasons why some nonvoters don’t vote. Dissatisfaction with the two-party system (a key factor for Milwaukee’s declining voter rates), rising violence against historically disenfranchised populations, and compelling arguments against voting as a liberatory tool constitute more accurate reasons for not voting.
The Knight Foundation surveyed 12,000 non-voters nationally and in 10 swing states. Nonvoters overwhelmingly lack faith in the election system and have doubts about their own votes. 38 percent of nonvoters are not confident that elections represent the will of the people. A 2017 Pew Research study found that 44 percent of eligible unregistered voters say they do not want to vote. 25 percent say they are unregistered because they are not inspired by a candidate or issue.
There are numerous systemic reasons why our mainstream, moneyed and ineffective political machine alienates the electorate. Strict voter ID laws (also a key factor in Milwaukee) disproportionately disenfranchise racial minorities who don’t have the right IDs or move frequently. Automatic, universal voter registration, which added 270,000 disproportionately young, Black, Latino and Asian-American people to Oregon’s voter rolls, only occurs in 19 states. Colorado’s vote by mail—which is nearly immune to voter fraud—boosted turnout among young and infrequent voters. Before the pandemic, this option was only available in a minority of states.
Frequent and long election seasons produce career politicians and incentivize an environment in which elected officials are in a constant state of fundraising and campaigning. I could go on listing voter suppression tactics (I haven't even mentioned gerrymandering or Kentucky’s catastrophic cuts to polling locations in predominately Black districts).
As a result—not of moral failure but of these systemic barriers—the conceptualization of voting as a tool for reducing harm is questionable. In fact, Indigenous peoples offer the most compelling argument for how abstention may be a rejection of settler colonial authority, a refusal for Indigenous People to assimilate into the U.S. polity. Discourse that underemphasizes the broken political system fails to offer transformative political (and constitutional) reform to address reasons for dissatisfaction and sources of harm.
The privileged nonvoter exists. It’s important to reiterate that many registered voters who engaged in the 2016 presidential primaries handed in a protest vote or actively decided not to vote. The #NeverBiden movement has gained followers. But they are not the only type of nonvoter.
Perhaps we move forward by disaggregating voting itself.
Local elections carry different implications and a different relationality to the electorate than federal elections. Positions like NC Commissioner of Insurance, NC Commissioner of Labor, District Attorneys, and school board members hold transformative and direct influence over local communities. In this space, voting can become a liberatory, impactful tool that achieves progress catered toward specific localities.
You Can Vote recently launched a “What’s on My Ballot” tool to do just that. The group is a nonpartisan organization that trains and mobilizes volunteers to educate, register, and empower all North Carolina citizens to vote. They also developed the tool to ensure people understand exactly how candidates relate to issues that affect them, starting with the most local positions. In my interview with You Can Vote Campus Director Jake Gellar-Goad, he explained, “I want students to know how much power they have. I want them to know they can pull those levers of power not just at the national level but at the local level.”
We’re in a moment where voting increasingly seems to refine increasingly ineffective and elitist institutions. To achieve any change, we must turn towards local elections. We must address systemic reasons for alienation, and we must protect historically disenfranchised populations as they exercise agency in how they use their citizenship. Maybe then, we can achieve some level of tangible progress in our own communities.
Hadeel Hamoud is a Trinity junior. Her column usually runs on alternate Fridays.
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