Data Is Beautiful

Seriously! I had no idea so few people voted.

Election Day should be a national holiday to give folks a chance to vote.

The government should pass a law that it's required to vote, or give a reasonable explanation why you can't. Employers are punished for keeping their employees from voting.

Its actually illegal to do this. Yes, that's stupid.

Maybe 3% voted for a third party, and because they aren't shown the other bars were expanded to fill the entire space

Because we have this stupid thing called the electoral college. Basically, each state has a certain number of votes, based (roughly) on population (its a whole other issue), and the states' votes are cast for whoever won the most votes within their state (barring rogue electors and the few states that use proportional representation for votes.) Theres a total of 538 votes, and all that matters is winning more than half of them. This has made the winner of the popular vote lose the election 5 times (though in 1824, it went to the house of representatives for a final decision because no one had a majority.)

To summarize: not a dumb question, VERY dumb answer.

Because in the US democracy every vote is equal, but some are more equal than others.

We were supposed to be a representative democracy with one rep for every 33,000 Americans. When voting for president each state gets one vote per rep and one for each of their two senators.

A while back some assholes decided that 33,000 is too representative and we should have a fixed number instead. So now it turns out that Wyoming should get one rep for every 58,000 Americans so their votes are worth far more than a Californian's.

People don’t vote, states vote. Semi proportionally to number of people, but it isn’t linear. This means that California gets 50 some odd votes and they all go to the democrats most of the time but Wyoming gets 3 (the minimum) despite it being smaller than many cities in population and they all go to the republicans basically every time. That’s why swing states are a thing that exists and matters. Back in the 00s Florida and Ohio were in the sweet spot of big and could go either way (insert joke about my girlfriend) but now they’re both considered firmly Republican states, meanwhile Wisconsin lost its Republican status and now swings as did Arizona. When people talk about texas possibly becoming a swing state as a big deal this is why, it doesn’t matter who gets the popular vote, texas is so big and serves as a counterweight to California and New York for the republicans that if the democrats win Texas without the republicans picking up several states that they never get, all of the swing states, or one of the two big hitters of the Dems then there’s basically no chance for them to win.

They usually justify it by saying it's to prevent the tyranny of the majority (two wolves and a sheep biting on dinner).

But a case could be made that it's a way to keep the elite entrenched.

The founders were a gentleman's club. Which is basically a fraternity. They made up rules that made sense to a bunch of frat boy farmers with enlightenment libraries.

It was a compromise so the smaller states were willing to join the United States. Same reason there are two senators for each state.

7% is enough to swing any election in history (the part of it that is shown on the chart)

I think even more horrifying is that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016

There is a map like that out there, if I remember correctly like 40+ states had “did not vote” win…

Step 1: make voting compulsory

Step 2: move it to a weekend

Step 3: easy access to prepoll or postal voting for people who can't make it on the official day

Bonus step: change voting system to IRV, or even better, to something proportional like MMP or STV

There you go. America has a functioning electoral system.

In norway, the lowest voter turnout we've ever had is 75.4%

Australia has mandatory voting which is an interesting one. Quick search tells me the last turnout was nearly 90%.