In the year 2028, voter turnout fell in the United States to such an extent that only six people voted in that year’s presidential election.
The winner, Republican Lee Dumbluck, received three of the six votes, while the Democrat received two and the sixth went to a third party candidate.
Most Americans still consider their country democratic, because most Americans have the opportunity to vote.
However, some political pseudoscientists believe there’s another reason why Americans continue to accept the result of their elections in which the winner receives a share of the votes that reflects the will of only a small minority of the total population.
Billy Wallaby, researcher at the Machiavelli Institute, maintains that after each election, the hundreds of millions of Americans who didn’t vote in 2028 were rendered invisible to the mass media, due to an electrochemical effect in the journalists’ brains.
According to Wallaby, “Most Americans can still call their president the leader of the free world, without falling to the floor and laughing for an uncomfortably long period of time, because the horde of nonvoters gets forgotten. Somehow, journalists literally can’t see the nonvoters, so they can’t report on the phenomenon. All that matters is counting the precious votes that are actually cast, so if only five votes are cast, those five voters are all that matter. The rest of the country might as well be living on Mars.
“If only we could pinpoint the neural effect at work, perhaps the blinders might be lifted and journalists could begin to do the elementary math needed to understand that our elections are jokes. Once that happens, Americans might find themselves reading in the news that if ‘democracy’ means rule by the majority, and only a minority of people show up to vote, the winner democratically represents only that small slice of the population, not the whole country, state, or county.
“If a large majority of the eligible voters vote, as happens in most democratic countries, the nonvoters can be written off, but when half the population or more doesn’t vote and yet the election result is heralded as a model for democracies everywhere, something’s rotten in Denmark.”
Marsha Thickglasses, historian at Harvard, has written extensively about American elections. “For many decades,” she said, “voter turnout in the US has been shockingly low. After 1908, turnout in midterm elections has always been below 50 percent of eligible voters, and often below 40 percent. That means the winning senator or congressperson might have garnered a voting share of less than a quarter of the total population of eligible voters in that part of the country. In the twentieth century, turnout in presidential elections has usually been around 55 percent, so again the winner is democratically supported by little more than a quarter of eligible voters, because the vote is often evenly split in the two-party system.”
Professor Thickglasses pointed out that after the Trump debacle, when Americans lost all hope and faith in their founding myths, voter turnout “dropped off a cliff.” “Now in 2028, when only a handful of persons bothered to show up to vote, you’d think that the thundering silence from the nonvoters would itself have some sort of political impact. Specifically, you’d figure it would discredit the result of the bogus election. But that never happens here.”
In European countries that have numerous political parties which split the vote, the winners share power proportionally with those who received smaller shares of the votes. But in the United States, the winner takes all. According to the professor, “That quantum leap from receiving perhaps only 20 percent of the vote from eligible voters, to going on to hold political power over both the rival voters and the many nonvoters is obviously undemocratic.”
One nonvoter, Marcus Appleby, would prefer for the nation to pay less attention to the American government. “Remember in high school,” he said, “when there was a silly students council, and the most popular, go-getting, good-looking kids ran in a farcical ‘election’ to be student representative, and only their eight or nine closest friends voted? And then nobody heard about the student council afterward until the next year’s phony election, but that popular kid got to add a line to his or her resume, and that was the end of it?
“Why can’t American elections be more like that? If our government’s a fraud, why can’t we at least keep it out of sight and mind? That’s what we nonvoters try to do, but the media insist on smothering us with stories about those spoiled, busy-body joiners, the politicians who need to flatter themselves and puff up their self-esteem with the illusion that the majority approves of them, when in fact most people couldn’t care less.”
A shrewd American nonvoter, Gong Li, has started the Nonvoters Party. “Our goal,” he said, “is to represent the nonvoters and to change the Constitution to account for our constituency. So if the Democratic and Republican candidates each get around 25 percent support from the eligible voters, and our candidate implicitly gets closer to 50 percent from the nonvoters, the Nonvoters Party should win. Our sole use of that democratic power then would be to declare the election null and void, in addition to being a sham. And Americans would be back at square one.”