Again, an answer that is partially prefabricated, Benjamin. I can tell this is not your common area of thinking. While you are a good thinker, and I am definitively a fan, this time you are repeating what folks are repeating to themselves.
When we look at a list of nations and their voter turnout, then there is a very strong correlation between the importance given to voters and their showing up.
https://www.ssb.no/en/valg/artikler-og-publikasjoner/lower-voter-turnout-than-sweden-and-denmark
The graph you can see in this link shows local voter turnout in Europe, and the UK is for instance one of the laggards. They have first-past-the-post, which means that not even the majority of the voters pick the winner, but rather the plurality. No wonder few show up because there is an incredibly good chance their vote turned out to be meaningless.
In top of the list, we have nations with proportional voting. So, there is a clear distinction between importance given to voters and their showing up to vote. Naturally, local elections are less important than national elections, so fewer voters do show up for local elections. Yet the format of voting delivers the distinction we see grosso modo in the graph.
https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/ncr-article/increasing-voter-turnout-in-local-elections/ “The percentages seen for voter turnout at local elections [in the US] show a range of “15 to 27 percent of eligible voters cast[ing] a ballot in their local elections.”
The USA would fall below any of the European outcomes for local voter turnout. There is very little reason why folks come out to vote. The worst city I saw was Denton, Maryland. They have five council seats in total, and one seat is voted on per year, the winner getting the seat for the duration of five years. That means that the majority picks that one seat, each and every year, all five voted on once every five years. In proportional voting each vote would declare what 20% of the voters desire. Not so in Denton, where a full ‘dictatorship of the majority’ got established because 50% plus one vote ends up getting all five seats. No wonder the voter turnout was also horribly low in Denton.
The USA has a voting system that limits the importance of the voters, plus there are so many political entities that the voters are made circumstantial in an additional manner compared to voters in Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain. In the USA, there is the Federal government (President, Senate, House), there is the State government (Governor, Senate, House) and the local government (Mayor, council or board, their often voted on in sections, not all seats, which diminishes voter expression additionally). The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Canada having its political gravity with the House of Commons is a good reason why voters come out to vote; they recognize the most important entity.
When there is no game of winners and losers, the largest number of voters do come out. It is near impossible to become a voting loser in any of the three mentioned European nations. Thomas Jefferson already devised a voting system without a game in it, so Statelings have no excuse not to familiarize themselves with it.
It was the State powers that be that turned the outcome into a two-party system by doubling down (and tripling down) on the purposefully limited Federal voting system. They copied that system while they should not have copied that, and they tripled it where it is actually none of their business doing so.
Thank you, Benjamin, for your communications on this. I hope you find the information informative.
