In the year 2028, voter turnout fell in the United States to
such an extent that only six people voted in that year’s presidential election.
The winner, Republican Lee Dumbluck, received three of the six
votes, while the Democrat received two and the sixth went to a third party
candidate.
Most Americans still consider their country democratic,
because most Americans have the opportunity to vote.
However, some political pseudoscientists believe there’s
another reason why Americans continue to accept the result of their elections
in which the winner receives a share of the votes that reflects the will of
only a small minority of the total population.
Billy Wallaby, researcher at the Machiavelli Institute, maintains
that after each election, the hundreds of millions of Americans who didn’t vote
in 2028 were rendered invisible to the mass media, due to an electrochemical
effect in the journalists’ brains.
According to Wallaby, “Most Americans can still call their
president the leader of the free world, without falling to the floor and
laughing for an uncomfortably long period of time, because the horde of
nonvoters gets forgotten. Somehow, journalists literally can’t see the
nonvoters, so they can’t report on the phenomenon. All that matters is counting
the precious votes that are actually cast, so if only six votes are cast,
those six voters are all that matter. The rest of the country might as well be
living on Mars.
“If only we could pinpoint the neural effect at work,
perhaps the blinders might be lifted and journalists could begin to do the
elementary math needed to understand that our elections are jokes. Once that
happens, Americans might find themselves reading in the news that if ‘democracy’
means rule by the majority, and only a minority of people show up to vote, the
winner democratically represents only that small slice of the population, not
the whole country, state, or county.
“If a large majority of the eligible voters vote, as happens
in most democratic countries, the nonvoters can be written off, but when half
the population or more doesn’t vote and yet the election result is heralded as
a model for democracies everywhere, something’s rotten in Denmark.”
Marsha Thickglasses, historian at Harvard, has written
extensively about American elections. “For many decades,” she said, “voter
turnout in the US has been shockingly low. After 1908, turnout in midterm
elections has always been below 50 percent of eligible voters, and often below
40 percent. That means the winning senator or congressperson might have
garnered a voting share of less than a quarter of the total population of
eligible voters in that part of the country. In the twentieth century, turnout
in presidential elections has usually been around 55 percent, so again the
winner is democratically supported by little more than a quarter of eligible
voters, because the vote is often evenly split in the two-party system.”
Professor Thickglasses pointed out that after the Trump
debacle, when Americans lost all hope and faith in their founding myths, voter
turnout “dropped off a cliff.” “Now in 2028, when only a handful of persons
bothered to show up to vote, you’d think that the thundering silence from the
nonvoters would itself have some sort of political impact. Specifically, you’d
figure it would discredit the result of the bogus election. But that never
happens here.”
In European countries that have numerous political parties
which split the vote, the winners share power proportionally with those who
received smaller shares of the votes. But in the United States, the winner
takes all. According to the professor, “That quantum leap from receiving
perhaps only 20 percent of the vote from eligible voters, to going on to hold political
power over both the rival voters and the many nonvoters is obviously
undemocratic.”
One nonvoter, Marcus Appleby, would prefer for the nation to
pay less attention to the American government. “Remember in high school,” he
said, “when there was a silly students council, and the most popular,
go-getting, good-looking kids ran in a farcical ‘election’ to be student
representative, and only their eight or nine closest friends voted? And then
nobody heard about the student council afterward until the next year’s phony
election, but that popular kid got to add a line to his or her resume, and that
was the end of it?
“Why can’t American elections be more like that? If our
government’s a fraud, why can’t we at least keep it out of sight and mind?
That’s what we nonvoters try to do, but the media insist on smothering us with
stories about those spoiled, busy-body joiners, the politicians who need to
flatter themselves and puff up their self-esteem with the illusion that the
majority approves of them, when in fact most people couldn’t care less.”
"No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there"
ReplyDeleteJustin Trudeau