Voter apathy

In politics, voter apathy is perceived apathy (lack of caring) among voters in an election. Voter apathy or lack of interest is often cited as a cause of low turnout among eligible voters in jurisdictions where voting is optional and the donkey vote where voting is compulsory. Voter fatigue describes a possible cause of voter apathy: elections that are held too frequently.

Political alienation may be confused with voter apathy. Sometimes, alienated voters do care about an election, but feel "estranged or disaffected from the system or somehow left out of the political process."

The psychological factors that influence voter behavior are a voter’s perceptions of politics, that is, how the voter sees the parties, the candidates, and the issues in an election. Many people are also very lazy when it comes to voting so they usually just pick the first candidates they see on the ballot just to get it over with. The farther down the ballot an office is, the fewer the number of votes that will be cast for it. This is called “Ballot fatigue”. The expression suggests that many voters exhaust their patience and/or their knowledge as they work their way down the ballot.

Prominent Founding Fathers writing in The Federalist Papers believed it was "essential to liberty that the government in general should have a common interest with the people," and felt that a bond between the people and the representatives was "particularly essential." They wrote "frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured." In 2009, however, few Americans were familiar with leaders of Congress.

Numerous reports suggest voter apathy is widespread and growing. The percentage of Americans eligible to vote who did, in fact, vote was 63% in 1960, but has been falling since.

Vanderbilt professor Dana D. Nelson in Bad for Democracy argues that all citizens seem to do, politically, is vote for president every four years, and not much else; they've abandoned politics. Apathy was lower in the 2008 election, which featured a competitive election for president. Voter turnout in 2008 (62%) was the highest since 1968.

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