Quotes About Voting

Remarkably, until the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1949, Britain retained plural voting for graduates of elite universities and business owners.

Brennan and Lomasky point to the expressive function of voting. Fans at a football game cheer not to help the home team win, but to express their loyalty. Similarly, citizens might vote not to help policies win, but to express their patriotism, their compassion, or their devotion to the environment. This is not hair-splitting. One implication is that inefficient policies like tariffs or the minimum wage might win because expressing support for them makes people feel good about themselves.

Would we still have a "democracy" if you needed to pass a test of economic literacy to vote? If you needed a college degree? Both of these measures raise the economic understanding of the median voter, leading to more sensible policies. Franchise restrictions were historically used for discriminatory ends, but that hardly implies that they should never be used again for any reason. A test of voter competence is no more objectionable than a driving test.

First, altruism and morality generally are consumption goods like any other, so we should expect people to buy more altruism when the price is low.34 Second, due to the low probability of decisiveness, the price of altruism is drastically cheaper in politics than in markets.35 Voting to raise your taxes by a thousand dollars when your probability of decisiveness is 1 in 100,000 has an expected cost of a penny.

Summing up: Correctly interpreted, the simple economic model specifically predicts that people will be less selfish as voters than as consumers. Indeed, like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we should expect voters to "stuff themselves" with moral rectitude. Once again, analogies between voting and shopping are deeply misleading.

Irrationality in politics is not a puzzle. It is precisely what an economic theory of irrationality predicts.

If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.

The laws that took the vote away from blacks—poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications—also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this.

It turned out to be the most bizarre election in the nation's history. Al Gore received hundreds of thousands of votes more than Bush, but the Constitution required that the victor be determined by the electors of each state. The electoral vote was so close that the outcome was going to be determined by the electors of the state of Florida. This difference between popular vote and electoral vote had happened twice before, in 1876 and 1888.

Thus it could moderate labor rebellion by channeling energy into elections—just as the constitutional system channeled possibly troublesome energy into voting.

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among savior, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For, if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system -how could voting, however broad, cut into such power?

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee….

If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us candidates

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

Helen Keller, writing in 1911 to a suffragist in England: Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee….

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

Even now, more than 30 years later, I still judge people on the basis of whether they voted for Jack Kennedy in 1960, or for Richard Nixon...Those bastards are scarred forever, and I'm not. At least not for that. Hell, it was an honor to be able to vote against Richard Nixon - and it will be an honor on November 3 [1992] to vote against George Bush and everything he stands for.

And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I

because it is a very elegant feeling to wake up in the morning and go down to your neighborhood polling place and come away feeling proud of the way you voted.

We might get our country back," said the construction man, stirred. "I feel like I lost it. I feel like I been lost in it all this time." "I've been lost too," said the gas-station operator. "I've been trying to find somebody I can understand to vote for.

He showed me a pencil-written analysis of the voting trends. In most black districts, Humphrey was beating McGovern two to one. In the white labor districts, McGovern was easily taking Humphrey. The blacks were clearly the only bloc in the state that had not gone all out for

But the problem isn't just a few frighteningly dumb politicians. The problem is they represent a frighteningly dumb electorate. The reason Louis Gohmert is a United States Congressman is that 180,000 Gohmers and Gohmettes in Texas' First District pulled the lever to send his bald-headed goober ass to D.C. Mr. Shitkicker goes to Washington. Apparently, it takes a village full of idiots to elect a village idiot. Sadly

I hope that young people will also look to politics as a vehicle to not only have their voices heard, but actually to be the change makers that they want to see. They are disaffected, understandably, but I hope that young people will not only turn out to vote but also run for office.