Number of eligible voters who did not vote recently

[dismal]

What does my act of voting have to do with my future? Not much that I can see.

As long as you don't complain when someone you didn't even bother to vote against does something that does affect you.

1) You have not shown what my voting has to do with whether they do something to affect me or not
2) It turns out it is my right to complain as much as I want regardless.

 

[Treedbear]

Seems to be about average turnout since the beginning of the 20th century. Source: The United States Elections Project

 

[ZiprHead]

Question for you Aussies: do you think mandatory voting gets people to be more involved?

 

[whichphilosophy]

I just heard a snippet from Obama's last world jaunt that 44% of eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election. Is that correct?
How can so many be so slack concerning their future?
While I would not have voted for either candidate (I still cannot believe that from 320 million people you managed to select such 2 appalling persons!) I would have cast a vote or registered a protest.
I am glad that Australia has compulsory voting to ensure that we have a more accurate (albeit forced) representation of the state of the populace's thinking.

What suggestion are available to have more voters make the effort to actually vote?

This is 1% down on the previous election. I can be corrected but this is what I read last time.

 

[bilby]

Question for you Aussies: do you think mandatory voting gets people to be more involved?

I think so. The number of spoiled ballots is small; It's difficult to assess the number of so-called 'donkey votes', where voters simply number the boxes from 1-n without regard for the candidates listed, as these are not easy to distinguish from genuine intent - but one way to estimate this is to look at the degree to which a higher ballot position gives a candidate an advantage, and while the advantage certainly does exist, it is only equivalent to about 2% of the vote.

For Federal Elections here, turnout is about 93%; Informal (invalid) votes are about 3%; and allowing for a 2% donkey vote amongst valid papers, that leaves more than 88% of eligible voters casting a valid and intentional ballot. To get even a turnout as high as that in the USA would be remarkable; In the order of one and a half times the proportion of eligible Australian voters cast a valid and intentional ballot, as compared with eligible US voters (88% vs about 55% is 1.6x).

To put it another way, as a proportion of the eligible voter population, for every two people in the US who get involved, there are three people in Australia who do the same.

Or still another way to look at it is that just over half of eligible Americans exercise their rights, while around seven eighths of eligible Australians do.