No Stupid Questions

One of the major flaws of the American voting system is the electrical college. It effectively means that for a large swath of Americans your vote doesn't matter unless you are voting for whom the majority of your state also voted for. Especially during tight elections, everything boils down to having the deciding votes, in a handful of states, if not a handful of counties in the entire country.

In a country of 300+ million people, the votes of only a handful of people in a select few locations really matter.

Are you a blue voter in a deep red state? Sorry the electrical college will throw out your vote and go with the majority.

Are you an independent voter in a deep blue state? Sorry you might as well be throwing out your vote.

Thanks to the electoral college a keen candidate can work the system and set it up so they win with the majority of the electrical votes, but not the majority of the overall votes.

TLDR: The reason why a good number of Americans didn't vote, was by DESIGN. The current system in America de-incentivizes a large portion of the population to vote. This was likely done on purpose. This also leaves the system wide open to manipulation, further de-incentivising, and thus compounding the problem.

I was furious that I felt like I was essentially forced to vote for Harris, but I did, as a tactical electoral decision.

But very obviously, there are an absolutely enormous amount of people here who are sick to death of corporatist neoliberal bullshit that the Democratic rank and file consistently perpetrates, and those politicians are seemingly under the impression that everyone’s too dumb to realize that’s what’s going on.

Well, their bluff got called - and yes, it happened in just about the worst context it possibly could have, but then again, the DNC thought they could phone it in (yet again) and it blew the fuck up in their face. The Democratic Party absolutely deserved that outcome (not to mention: pretty much all of the party leaders appear to have learned absolutely nothing from this shitshow). It’s just an absolute tragedy that said outcome also has the implication of fully destroying any remaining vestige of Pax Americana, any pretense of altruism in American foreign policy and geopolitical action, democracy itself in the US, and perhaps even the US itself in the mid- to long-term (i.e. I would not be terribly shocked if the US ends up balkanized in the coming decade or two). And it was all predictable and avoidable, and nothing was done because, in addition to a complete and total lack of political will, too many people were making too much money for too long of a time, and didn’t want any of that shit disrupted.

Anyways I’m gonna go have a cig or something, jesus fucking fuck

I would guess that the majority of the 50% of non voters willingly didn't vote, but some of that 50%, other than the previously mentioned exceptions, maybe couldn't due to disenfranchisement from purging voter roles, or since it's not a government holiday, maybe couldn't leave work to vote. I believe legally it has to be allowed, but we all know that doesn't mean that it always is, and some people work a distance from their voting station. For example, I travel an hour for work on Wednesdays, stay remote, then drive back home Thursday evening. If that happened to be on a voting day where early voting isn't possible, that could disqualify me, or at least make it really difficult to vote.

But as mentioned, I think the majority is due to apathy or ignorance, willful or not.

Those who didn’t vote and those who voted for Trump have Minnesota blood on their hands.