Exercise your franchise

My home state of Washington has an excellent voting system. Since 2012 it has been 100% vote-by-mail, and I'd presumed the participation rates had jumped a lot from the before-times to the current system, but it's not as much as I thought.

Going by voting-eligible population (everyone who legally could be registered to vote if they wanted to be), we used to be in the 55-60% neighborhood; since the switch we've been 66%, 66%, and 75% (national figures those years were 58%, 59%, and 66%). Better, to be sure, but still not great.

Measured by registered voters, it looks better, of course—81%, 79%, and 84% in 2012, 2016, and 2020 respectively—but all that really tells me is that around 15-20% of people interested enough to be registered don't bother, which is also frustrating. This is a state that makes it super easy to register, too. You can even do it online. Even if you wait until election day itself, you can still register in person.

So with very few impediments, even in high-participation 2020, almost 600,000 Washingtonians who could vote didn't. Bummer. We're not a swing state, which may account for some of the non-votes. Going by midterm turnout, which drops 10-20%, and off-year turnout, which tends to be about half, POTUS is what gets a lot of folks to bother and some people (I've known a few) think it's pointless because of the electoral college.

Yes, yes, the electoral college sucks; it exists because of slavery and the only times it could have justified its existence as some have described it—a bulwark against corrupt processes and a dangerous candidate achieving office—it failed. It gave us Trump, G.W. Bush, and the Rutherford B. Hayes mess. (Which, come to think of it, are only failures if your metric of success is the greater good for the country; given why the thing was created in the first place, as all three times the anti-equality/protect-the-monied candidate became President, it actually kinda worked as designed.) The sooner it gets consigned to the dustbin of history the better. But until then, we work with what we've got.

Even in less-critical times, I'd be encouraging everyone who can to vote. I have done, to the point of annoyance in a couple of cases. Last time around, I was a lot more emphatic because the stakes were so much higher than they'd ever been. And this year, the stakes are just as high if not higher than in 2020.

We have it easy here in Washington. We don't have to wait in line, or face "polling place monitors," or prove our citizenship if we have an accent or our last name is something like Fernández. Our legislature isn't actively trying to purge us from the registration rolls or eliminating polling locations or allowing armed thugs to guard ballot boxes. So it may sound hollow from me, here in the easy-peasy Pacific Northwest, but no matter what state you live in, please, for the sake of everyone you know, the country, and the planet itself, vote. And vote for Kamala Harris. Not a third-party, not a "protest vote," and certainly not for the fascist Republicans—this time the margin needs to be as large as possible, electoral college or not. We need to break records here. I want to see a spread in the popular vote that beats Nixon's and Lyndon Johnson's. I want to see better-than-Coolidge numbers, people!

I realize everyone who visits here is likely already on board with this, so maybe share the sentiment with your own circles and encourage them to share with their circles. (Kind of like a pyramid scheme, I guess, but for good instead of evil.) I don't fully understand the people that pay no attention to government and politics, but they're out there and there's a ton of them. We have 600,000 could-but-don't voters here, for crying out loud.

These people need to be told that the lifestyle they currently enjoy, where they can go about their lives without giving a damn about government and politics, will go away in a hurry if this election goes badly. Quoting "JojoFromJerz":

None of us will be safe under a second Trump term. Not his supporters. Not his minions. Not his family. No one. He doesn’t have the capacity to consider anyone else’s safety but his own, let alone the collective of the American people. Far worse than that though, is the fact that there isn’t a human being on the planet, other than Putin anyway, whose life he wouldn’t trade for his own benefit.

Again, none of this is stuff we have to guess at.

He wanted to shoot protesters in the legs. Wanted to shoot migrants.

He put kids in motherfucking cages.

What he could and likely would do while surrounded with yes men and handed a blank check to bludgeon would be worse than anything we’ve ever known.

I for one ain’t sticking around for any of that shit.

So, let’s make sure he loses shall we?

Let’s vote like our lives depend on it.

Because they very much fucking do.

This is my best estimate of where things stand tonight, electoral-college-wise. With enough work, I think we can get at least five of those tan states and maybe even one of the pink ones to turn blue. Let's make it happen.