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To: Dead Corpse
You are incorrect. Your individual experiences aside, the vast majority of people who do not vote, and even more of those who do not even register, do not care what happens. They are apathetic, even content, with the way the government is run.

Those who say, 'My vote doesn't even count', are just using an excuse why not to vote, not a reason why they don't vote.

Let's put it this way. (I'm sorry, I work in examples.) Let's say there is a village of 100 people living on a beach at the bottom of a cliff. All they can eat are coconuts that grow on trees at the top of the cliff. The cliff is not too steep, anyone in the village could climb it, but it is an hour climb. 40 people in the village regularly make trips to the top of the cliff to gather fresh coconuts to eat and the remaining 60 eat the old coconuts that fall over the cliff.

If you ask those 60 why they don't climb the cliff, they might say "Why? I'm eating coconuts anyway?" What they don't want to say, but is the truth, is "I get my coconuts, and it's not worth an hour trip just to get better coconuts."

Voter apathy has more to do with their contentment at getting the scraps that roll down to them than philisophical disillusionment with the results.

65 posted on 11/08/2002 2:32:29 PM PST by Anitius Severinus Boethius
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To: Anitius Severinus Boethius; Shooter 2.5
Anitius Severinus Boethius:
You are incorrect. Your individual experiences aside, the vast majority of people who do not vote, and even more of those who do not even register, do not care what happens. They are apathetic, even content, with the way the government is run.

      It's not really the apathy of the sheeple that bothers me.  It's their ignorance.  Our newspaper had a column last month about the results of a poll which concluded that less than 10% (don't remember the exact figure) know that freedom of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution, or are aware of any of the other Bill of Rights guarantees.
      The result, maybe, of an educational system which spends more time on the biographies of movie stars than it does on the biographies of the Founding Fathers?
      Personally, I hope the ignorant and the apathetic stay home on election days.
     
Shooter 2.5:
If someone doesn't know the difference between Liberals and Conservatives, they haven't been paying attention.

      But anyone who believes that Liberal == Democrat and Conservative == Republican should take off the blinders.
90 posted on 11/08/2002 11:04:19 PM PST by Celtman
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