It's an Election Year! But I'm Not Even Registered...
2008-08-29 18:24 - Opinion
I turned 18 in 1998, smack dab in between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It's 10 years later, and I've still never registered. Partially because I just can't motivate myself to invest the time to educate myself enough to feel I made the "right" vote, partly because I don't think it really matters (either way, somebody bought that candidate), and mostly because I think the electoral college is bunk.
Perhaps 200 years ago, it made sense to "chunk" tallying the election, but it doesn't today. I took the time to find detailed election data for New York (deep link) and it tells quite a tale.
The graph is the voting history for New York state, over the past 50 years. Over that time frame, there have been twelve presidential elections, but in only three cases did Republican win the state, Democrat taking the other nine, and generally by larger margins. Any politically minded person will tell you (or, they've told me, at least!) that the New York outcome is all but a foregone conclusion.
As I said at first, I'm not horribly well informed. As things are now, I'd probably go with the majority anyway — but it doesn't matter! If I decided to vote republican, I'd probably need to find about 1.4 million other people to agree with me (or change 700k Dems' minds). Anything less, and the electoral votes will end up exactly the same. I can go back and forth a bit, but the conclusion comes out the same: Meh.
