Voter Turnout Essay

major felonies in some states. The decline of voter participation has always been a debate in the public arena. According to McDonald and Popkin, it is “the most important, most familiar, most analyzed, and most conjectured trend in recent American political history (2001, 963)” The question is, how important is voter

voting because of increased voter turnout rates, the questionability of the legitimacy of our government and the education of politics for the people. The voter turnout rates can lead to a multitude of things like education and more accurate votes to the simple feel of completing a civic duty. The endgame of voter turnouts is the education of voters involved (Document F) as well as the accuracy of the vote being unquestionable (Document E). This increased voter turnout can lead to the connection

decline in voter participation; Great Britain is a great example of this. The country has witness turnout in elections falling slowly as time pass. However, the election of 2001 dropped the country from their average of 76% voter turnout to just a 59.4% turnout. Comparatively, Australia, a former colony of Britain, has enjoyed high and steady voter participation since 1924 because of the implementation of compulsory voting. This system has proven to be not only effective in bring voters to the polls

local, state, or national. However, it is not compulsory for people to vote in elections, meaning that even if a person is a registered voter there is no definitive law that states that they must vote in an upcoming election or face consequences for not voting. Because voting is not mandatory, voter turnout fluctuates nationally and elections with low voter turnout are not representative of the entire population. In other democratically run systems, such as Australia and Brazil, there are laws that

“priming” and “fraud” being discussed in relation to their existence, but they have played a huge role in the outreach program to increase overall voter turnout. There have been arguments that they decrease the urgency of the vote which has also been applied to early voting periods and Election Day Registration acts, but they succeeded in increasing the voter turnout rate overall and decreasing the wait lines at the poll, bringing forth the question as to why voting urgency would be a necessity in the process

age will increase the number of voters, it is not guaranteed to increase the percentage of participation. We must also consider the fact that younger voters tend not to vote. Another concern is the involvement of young adults ages 16-18 in politics. It is not common that these teens follow politics and think about who would be a good leader for their country. Lowering the voting age most likely will not help to improve voter turnout or participation or turnout. We need to work toward increasing

cast a legally valid ballot. If countries have a singular goal of simply increasing voter turnout, compulsory voting could remedy this problem and it should be more accurately defined as being compulsory voter turnout (Lever, 2010). The belief that compulsory voting inherently improves democracy is misleading (Lever, 2010). Canada should not force its citizen’s to vote because other then increasing voter turnout, compulsory voting would

period of any constitutional amendment” (n.d.). Now, one would think that the record-breaking ratification of an expansion of voting rights would inspire young people to flock to the polls. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Since 1972, youth voter turnout has been on the decline. According to the Child Trends Databank, 50 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 participated in the 1972 presidential election (2015). Nearly three decades later, the percentage of young adults aged 18 to 24 who voted in

technology, hampering voter fraud, and increasing faith in the electoral system, President George W. Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act (Gerken 14). Since the implementation of this act, controversial voter identification laws have begun springing up all over the country. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “thirty-one states require all voters to show ID before voting at the polls. In fifteen of these, the ID must include a photo of the voter; in the remaining sixteen

States struggled for just about 200 years to obtain the promise of equality in voting rights for all (African-Americans and women), and yet the turnout for voters has been consistently below the fifty percent mark. Is there a decrease in voters who are exercising their right to cast a vote, or is it a surveying error turning out an illusion of low voter turnout? There has been a lot of effort put forth to explain this phenomenon, but have yet to come up with one solid answer or reason. It is known that