The New York Times, October 29, 2018: What if everyone voted?
Policies that make voting easier would also make American democracy more representative and less likely to favor the interests of wealthier, older and white voters who typically turn out at higher rates.
Others aren’t convinced it’s a problem that the voting population doesn’t resemble the American population. Some groups just aren’t that interested, they say. Trying to coax them to participate — tailoring our laws to “political couch potatoes,” as Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, once put it — would lead only to bloated voter rolls, likelier vote fraud and a more uninformed government, they warn.
It’s impossible to know what would have happened had the people sitting out elections voted. But Bernard Fraga, an Indiana University political scientist, has tried to gauge that alternative reality using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which annually surveys thousands of Americans.
It’s not clear, though, that indifference or ignorance is primarily what’s holding back people from voting. Hourly workers, who vote at lower ratesthan professionals, may not have paid time off to vote. Minorities, who vote at lower rates than whites, have historically been the target of voter suppression laws. Structural barriers to voting and attitudes toward it are closely related.
In trying to separate them, we talk about voting in ways that seldom apply to other rights.
