Free Republic

A higher percentage of eligible voters regularly show up to the polls in Mexico, Brazil, and Slovakia than in the world's pre-eminent and oldest democracy.The two parties that, in reality, constitute a uniparty duopoly bend over backward to cater to their respective pet voting blocs (racial minorities for Democrats and Evangelicals for Republicans, for instance). But those demographics pale in comparison to the volume of non-voters.The 2020 presidential election was a banner year for participatory democracy. It turned out a record number of voters (most of them presumably legal, eligible ones), amounting to 62% of the electorate. That's the best...

What sort of person travels a thousand miles to challenge the results of an election they didn’t even bother to vote in?...At least eight of the people who are now facing criminal charges for their involvement in the events at the Capitol did not vote in the November 2020 presidential election, according to an analysis of voting records from the states where protestors were arrested and those states where public records show they have lived. They came from states around the country and ranged in age from 21 to 65...

More Americans voted in 2020 than in any other presidential election in 120 years. About 67% of eligible voters cast ballots this year, but that still means a third did not. That amounts to about 80 million people who stayed home. To better understand what motivates these nonvoters, NPR and the Medill School of Journalism commissioned Ipsos to conduct a survey of U.S. adults who didn't vote this year. The Medill school's graduate students did deep dives into various aspects of the survey here. Nonvoters' reasons for not voting include: not being registered to vote (29%) not being interested in...

WASHINGTON - In a race that is expected to come down to a tiny margin of votes in a handful of swing states, more than 80 million eligible Americans will sit out this year’s presidential election. These potential voters could make all the difference for President Barack Obama - a new survey shows they overwhelmingly support the president over Republican rival Mitt Romney - but they won’t vote for him, even though a majority acknowledge that politics makes a difference in their lives. A Suffolk University-USA Today survey found that 43 percent of unregistered Americans and 43 percent of registered...

US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be struggling to nudge ahead of his Republican rival in polls at home, but people across the world want him in the White House, a BBC poll said. All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Senator Obama elected US president ahead of Republican John McCain. In 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the US and the rest of the world to improve if Senator Obama wins. More than 22,000 people were questioned by pollster GlobeScan in countries ranging from Australia to India and across Africa, Europe...

<p>One of California's many political peculiarities is the persistent -- even widening -- cultural gap between the state's residents and its voters.</p> <p>Although California's non-Latino white population has been declining steadily in relative terms and now is well below 50 percent, the state's electorate remains overwhelmingly white. In fact, after years of slow decline, the white vote jumped in last month's election, from 70 percent of the total in 2000 to 76 percent in 2002.</p>