Voter Turnout

This post is re-created in its entirety as a comment on Impolite Company (http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2867940/26810328) - but I thought I'd post it here, too, if only to boost my postings count.

I've been thinking about voter turnout, and how low it tends to be here in the good ole' US of A, since I first read Morisey's post last week.

First of all, part of the reason we have such low turnout here in the states is a psychological phenomenon called "learned helplessness." The classic experiment used to illustrate this is the one where they would shock dogs randomly. After a while, the dogs just sort of gave up and lay there (read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness)
Basically, I think many Americans don't believe that their vote really matters, so they don't bother. Unfortunately, they're often right - how many Democrats don't vote in Texas because Texas is a red state? That sort of thing.

Making matters worse is that even in the best circumstances, a single individual's vote is rarely going to translate into a direct change in his or her life. If you vote, your guy (or woman) might get elected, and they might vote in a way that benefits you, and it might not get blocked by opposition, and it might eventually trickle down to affect your life. That's a lot of mights, and even when they all fall into place, the cause and effect are separated from each other enough that it's not really apparent.

So, what to do? There's the carrot-and-stick approach, where we either reward folks for voting, or punish them for not voting, say by levying a fine. This works for things like jury duty and income taxes(sort of), but it wouldn't work for voting, for the simple reason that you can motivate people to vote, but you can't really motivate them to vote intelligently. You can't make them care. So if everyone has to pay $25 if they don't vote (or, as Toad a la Mode suggests, gives them a free ice cream from McDonald's if they do), you'll have greater turnout, but a large number of folks would show up and press random buttons and go home. And that really wouldn't be so great for the democracy.

Which sort of brings us around full circle, with a low-but-hopefully-motivated voter pool. But I do think there is one thing that we could do that could improve voter turnout. What if every registered voter received in the mail a "voter information" packet, that listed your polling place, the day of voting, and a summary of the issues and candidates on the ballot? The great thing is that this information already exists, it's just not disseminated in a concerted way. The League of Women Voters always creates an awesome voter guide - we really just need someone to mail it to people.