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10: Elections

  • Page ID
    204120
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    Ask ten different Americans what it means to be a good citizen, and you might get ten different answers, each representing a distinct view of civic responsibility and the actions, beliefs, or characteristics it entails. Yet most if not all of them would include in their answer the act of voting. Unlike countries such as Australia and Brazil where voting is compulsory, America does not legally require its citizens to participate in elections. Nevertheless, voting is widely regarded as every adult American’s duty, something which we often feel ashamed for not doing (and which we feel free to shame others for not doing).

    Photograph of Pete Buttigieg speaking to supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2020
    Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks to supporters in Des Moines the night before winning the chaotic 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses.

    It’s easy to understand why voting is so central to the American ideal of good citizenship. Elections are the main mechanism — though not the only one — by which public opinion is incorporated into democratic policymaking. Popular sovereignty and majority rule depend on regular input from the populace, and both are undermined when voting-eligible citizens abstain from elections. The fewer people participate in the electoral process, the less true it is that “the people rule,” and the likelier it is that the majority which determines the outcome of the election will itself constitute only a minority of the population. Practically speaking, a democracy with extremely low participation is indistinguishable from an aristocracy in which only a handful of citizens wield political power.

    Elections in the United States are designed to convert public opinion into government policy, but this conversion is neither simple nor direct. Public sentiment is mostly filtered through an indirect democratic process in which politicians are chosen to act on the behalf of the voters who elected them, and the rules for electing these politicians vary from state to state and from office to office. These complexities make American elections much more than merely counting votes to see who or what has the most.


    This page titled 10: Elections is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Benjamin R. Kantack (Tekakwitha Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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