They Didn’t Vote For This

It's counterproductive to blame nonvoters.

Image credit: Tom Arthur, CC

Last week I argued that even though voting is a casual and often confused choice not based on policy, people who vote for white supremacy are in fact morally culpable.

You will also sometimes hear people arguing that anyone who didn’t vote is also responsible for Trump and accrues moral blame. I think this is wrong-headed—not least because it leads to blaming the disenfranchised, rather than blaming those who are actively working to disenfranchise them.

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The US discourages voting

In 2024, around 64% of the adult US voting population cast ballots. That’s historically high for the US, but is still low in comparison to other democracies. Countries like Sweden, Peru, and South Korea often have voting rates of over 75%.

People will sometimes point to low US voting as a sign that the US public is uniquely ignorant or disengaged. And it’s true that US voters are fairly disengaged. But that’s not because they’re ignorant or especially un-civic minded. It’s because the US, historically and still, puts a lot of effort into preventing people from voting.

Most of the discussion of disenfranchisement focuses on GOP efforts to deliberately keep people away from the polls. These include efforts to purge eligible voters from voter rolls, to put in place voter ID laws that disproportionately affect Black voters; to close polling places in Democratic majority districts to create long voting lines; and to enact partisan gerrymanders which make minority votes worthless.

I don’t want to downplay the importance of or damage caused by these bad faith assaults on voting. But I think it’s also important to understand that even without GOP manipulation, the basic state of voting in the US is still designed to discourage voters.

The biggest barrier to voting in the US is that voting is a two-step process. Most democracies create voter rolls, essentially registering voters automatically. To vote, you just show up at your polling place and your name is already there if you are eligible.

This seems like a small thing, but it has a huge effect on voter behavior. Most people do not pay attention to elections; they only really tune in the week of, or sometimes even the day of, the vote—especially in non presidential years. Requiring people to sign up ahead of time is just begging people to forget to register, or to forget that they already have registered.

Another confounding factor for voters is that every state administers the vote differently. A person moving from one state to another needs to jump through a different set of hoops. Again, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. But for people who aren’t necessarily thinking about elections at all, it’s a system designed to trip them up.

Finally, there’s the electoral college. Presidential contests are the elections which catch most people’s attention. They are therefore the elections most likely to get people connected to the electoral and political systems. Voting is a habit; most people form that habit in presidential years.

But in the US, the vast majority of voters outside of a handful of swing states know that their votes in presidential elections don’t really matter. Turnout is reliably higher in swing states, where people see active campaign ads and know that how they vote can affect outcomes. And again, there’s every reason to believe that discouraging people from voting in presidential elections leads to lower turnout in all elections, and to a general feeling of alienation from the system as a whole.

We need to reduce barriers, not blame voters for not getting over them

Republicans will sometimes argue that barriers to voting are good, because only highly motivated, highly informed voters should be casting ballots. Even Democrats and progressives sometimes express frustration with nonvoters, claiming that voters have a responsibility to pay attention to elections, and to do all they can to vote no matter what the disincentives.

These arguments are an example of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the belief that individuals have absolute responsibility for their own choices; we are all, for neoliberals, equal autonomous self-optimizers, and are therefore all equally responsible for our own successes or failures. In this self-help view, it doesn’t really matter what obstacles are put in your way; you overcome them through strength of will and prove that you are virtuous, or you fail and prove that you are a weak-moralled loser at capitalism and at life.

Hopefully that makes the problem with this line of thinking clear. First, it’s just empirically garbage; a white wealthy middle-aged guy with a current passport who has lived in a Republican suburb for four generations is going to have a much easier time voting than a Native American with no ID and no registered address traveling to a different state to find work. Disenfranchisement tends to target marginalized people, which means elected officials are less responsive to marginalized people, which in turn leads marginalized people to be less likely to vote, creating a vicious cycle.

And (second) that vicious cycle is only exacerbated by insisting on the moral culpability of non-voters. The disincentives to vote in the US are pervasive and powerful, and they are not going to be overcome by shaming individuals or by haranguing people for not voting—not least because the people who don’t vote tend to be most disconnected from election information, and so are extremely unlikely to hear your harangues.

Acknowledging the responsibility of MAGA voters is important mostly because it’s important to show solidarity with those who voted against MAGA; you need to acknowledge that MAGA voters set out to hurt people so you can do your best to prevent them from doing more harm. People who have made an immoral choice for fascism are dangerous and not necessarily trustworthy. It’s vital to keep that in mind even when (or especially when) those people belatedly make the correct decision to abandon the GOP.

With nonvoters, the calculus is very different. They haven’t for the most part made affirmative decisions to opt out. They’ve (mostly) been discouraged or blocked from voting through policy choices driven by confused or malevolent policy. Emphasizing their blameworthiness is morally confused, not least because it actually makes it harder to change the policies that lead people not to vote.

Just as blaming the poor is a way to entrench poverty, so blaming nonvoters is a way to entrench nonvoting. If you want more people to vote, attacking non voters is useless and worse than useless. Instead, the moral, and effective, course is to focus on changing the deliberate policies that keep people from casting their ballots.