Quotes About Voting

In a racially divided society, majority rule is not a reliable instrument of democracy.

The wonder of a free-market society is that we can all do our best to package our message in an entertaining fashion and present it - and then everybody votes with their footsteps.

What most people didn't realize in the Western countries is that here its not a question of having supporters, its a question of getting these votes to the polling stations.

The 1970s, fewer than 25% of US residents lived in counties in which the presidential candidate won by landslide. 30 years later, that percentage has nearly doubled.

The incentives toward reactive ethnic voting are strong. When voters of one group choose, in effect, not to choose but to give their vote predictably on an ethnic basis to an ethnically defined party, they put voters of the other group who do choose among parties at a collective disadvantage. All else being equal, such voters will seek to reduce their disadvantage by concentrating their votes in a comparable ethnic party. In such a situation, ethnic votes tend to drive out nonethnic votes.

Democrats comprised 37% of voting electorate in 200 compared with 46% in 1960. If the electorate of 2000 had the same balance of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents as the electorate of 1960, Gore would have won an additional 3% of the vote.

Democracy is not something we have, it's something we do.

the group does not accept a simple majority as a proper basis for action.

A greater sense of do-it-yourself (DIY) politics is exposed by the fact Cascadians are more likely to disagree that "voting is the only way people like me can have a say about how the government runs things" (54 percent disagree versus 37 percent, RoNA).

Voting is the foundational act that breathes life into the principle of the consent of the governed.

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.

I simply cannot vote for Senator Obama because he's not pro-life.

I think of a man in the voting booth who hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of toothpaste in a drugstore," Reeves explained. "The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice.

Some people say we need a third party. I wish we had a second one.

They seem to be simple because they have formal heads and definite forms, councils, voting assemblies, and so forth, for arriving at decisions. But the formal heads, the kings, presidents, and so forth, are really not the directive heads. They are merely the figure heads. They do not decide. They merely make gestures of potent and dignified acquiescence when decisions are put to them.

A nation that does not read much does not know much. And a nation that does not know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. And those decisions ultimately affect the entire nation...the literate and illiterate.

When you can carry five full dinner platters on your left arm, you should be able to vote, even if you're not eighteen.

All the Democrats who voted for him [Clarence Thomas] were from the South, the opposite of what had happened in 1967, when Southern Democratic senators opposed [Thurgood] Marshall. By 1991, blacks had become a core constituency of Southern senators, and Democrats feared alienating them with a vote against Thomas.

New Jersey, in 1844, became the last state to add the qualifying male to citizen, and women who had been voting all along could not vote anymore.

Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.

Modern democratic institutions, built for an era with very different information technology, provide little comfort for those who are angered by the dissonance. Voting, campaigning, the formation of coalitions—all of this seems retrograde in a world where other things happen so quickly.

A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light - in other words, through life - registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.

It doesn't take a lot of seniority to vote the way you promised to vote.

What does that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the electorate?