Telling people to stop making excuses for other people doesnt help, if voting is less convenient for some people, then some fraction of those people arent going to bother. Making it into a moral failing for those people is just making excuses for flaws in the system. Should they bother? Sure, but what people should do isnt relevant here, the effects of what they actually do is.
People who couldn’t be bothered to get off their ass to vote got us Trump. Stop infantilizing lazy voters. There are plenty of free options to get to the polls.
Hey dummy, the people who brought us trump spent decades making voting as inconvenient as possible specifically for the groups who wouldn’t vote for them.
I don’t disagree that people being lazy and apathetic is a huge issue… but so is disenfranchisement. Telling people who have less recourse in voting than others to “just suck it up” is about as unhelpful as it gets.
Its a statistical effect, not infantilization. Suppose they are just lazy. What then? Do you expect that if enough people realize this and call them out on it, that people that didnt vote will suddenly realize the error of their ways and go do it next time? If they are, but you treat them as if any existing difficulty to voting was the cause and work to make it easier instead of casting blame, what harm would be done? If I “stop infantilizing lazy voters” as you think it, what benefit is achieved?
It seems to me that if what is necessary to achieve a better outcome is for people that tend to stay home to vote instead, then it makes sense to do whatever it is that will make them more likely to do it, whether or not they seem to deserve it or not. And people rarely do what you wish them to do after you assign blame to them for something, regardless of how true that blame is. Assigning blame, if you can back it up with appropriate consequences, can help change the behavior of specific individuals. But it virtually never is effective at changing large and vague groups whose members you do not even know. To do that, you have to create systems that push people into a desirable behavior rather than leaving it up to their personal responsibility that has already shown, by the fact that the end you want isnt already happening, to be ineffective.
Uber and Lyft exist.
Most cities provide free public transport to and from polls on Election Day.
Mail in ballots are available in many jurisdictions.
Stop making excuses for people who can’t be bothered to vote.
Telling people to stop making excuses for other people doesnt help, if voting is less convenient for some people, then some fraction of those people arent going to bother. Making it into a moral failing for those people is just making excuses for flaws in the system. Should they bother? Sure, but what people should do isnt relevant here, the effects of what they actually do is.
People who couldn’t be bothered to get off their ass to vote got us Trump. Stop infantilizing lazy voters. There are plenty of free options to get to the polls.
Hey dummy, the people who brought us trump spent decades making voting as inconvenient as possible specifically for the groups who wouldn’t vote for them.
I don’t disagree that people being lazy and apathetic is a huge issue… but so is disenfranchisement. Telling people who have less recourse in voting than others to “just suck it up” is about as unhelpful as it gets.
Its a statistical effect, not infantilization. Suppose they are just lazy. What then? Do you expect that if enough people realize this and call them out on it, that people that didnt vote will suddenly realize the error of their ways and go do it next time? If they are, but you treat them as if any existing difficulty to voting was the cause and work to make it easier instead of casting blame, what harm would be done? If I “stop infantilizing lazy voters” as you think it, what benefit is achieved?
It seems to me that if what is necessary to achieve a better outcome is for people that tend to stay home to vote instead, then it makes sense to do whatever it is that will make them more likely to do it, whether or not they seem to deserve it or not. And people rarely do what you wish them to do after you assign blame to them for something, regardless of how true that blame is. Assigning blame, if you can back it up with appropriate consequences, can help change the behavior of specific individuals. But it virtually never is effective at changing large and vague groups whose members you do not even know. To do that, you have to create systems that push people into a desirable behavior rather than leaving it up to their personal responsibility that has already shown, by the fact that the end you want isnt already happening, to be ineffective.
But discouraging the “wrong” people from voting is a deliberate tactic.
Poll taxes.