Only once in modern times has an American election drawn fewer than half of eligible voters to the polls: Bill Clinton verses Robert Dole in 1996. Turnout was 49%.
Way back in the olden days it happened twice.
In 1920 Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox with 49.2% participating.
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge defeated John W. Davis and Robert M. La Follette in a three-way race with a 48.9% turnout.
The largest voter turnout occurred during the Rutherford B. Hayes verses Samuel J. Tilden contest in 1876. It was America’s 100th birthday year. Hayes won the election in the electoral college by one vote. He lost the popular count by a quarter-million.
81.8% of qualified men turned out to vote — women wouldn’t be permitted to vote for another 45 years. Most historians say the presidential election of 1876 was the biggest vote-mess in US history.
From Wikipedia: On November 11, three days after election day … results … were rendered uncertain because of fraud by both parties.
To make a long story short, Southern Democrats agreed to award all disputed electoral votes to Republican Hayes if he promised to put an end to Reconstruction.
The verbal (non-written) Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in the South. Freed slaves were left at the mercy of whites who did not intend to preserve their rights.
Whites forced the overwhelming majority of blacks (who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line) to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before permitting them to grasp the gold ring of enfranchisement.
The election of 1876 became an inflection point in the history of the United States. Termination of Reconstruction enabled the now united country to inject its military might into the Indian Wars. There was a genocide to wage; besides, a decade or more of help from the Ku Klux Klan had neatly terrorized the genie of racial equality back into its bottle.
The military was no longer needed to defend desperate Negroes. The Klan was more than eager to take over the job. As this essay is written, many historians continue to argue that segregation and inequality remain endemic in vast swaths of America.
From 1877 onward, KKK castrations and hangings convinced most Negroes that pursuing voting rights wasn’t worth the price: it would be 90 years before whites let blacks get anything close to an even break in the contest for survival in capitalist, racist America.
After 1877, whites decided to move past their ugly divide over slavery to neutralize instead the native Americans whose lands the Europeans had seized. If whites felt compelled to kill hundreds-of-thousands of “redskins” (and break dozens of treaties) to make the wilderness safe for whites, so what? Universal suffrage could wait, right? Voting hardly seemed relevant when so much killing needed done.
Decades of injustice and indifference marched forward into the 21st century before at long last the election of Barack Obama garnered anything close to a large majority turnout. 66.2% showed-up in 2008 to flip history on its head, according to the Washington Post.
The first black president — a valid Hawaiian birth-certificate enabled him to run — gathered the largest popular vote ever – 69.5 million. It’s a record not likely to be broken anytime soon. Donald Trump, eight years later in a country more densely populated, acquired a paltry 63 million.
[Note from Editors: President Biden received 81.3 million votes in 2020. 66.8% of eligible voters participated in the election.]
Obama served two terms for eight years despite strong and persistent protestations by Donald Trump and his lily-white supporters that Barry was a Kenyan Muslim — a hater of all things American — a wannabe wrecker of white privilege.
The attacks have never really ended. Donald is threatening to charge Obama with treason for ordering spooks to “spy” on his campaign; for orchestrating an attempted “coup”. Perhaps a death sentence by hanging is the appropriate punishment.
In 2016 Trump with help from Russian, Israeli, and evangelical elites seized control of the United States despite one of the most lopsided popular defeats of any candidate in the history of USA elections. DT lost the popular vote by 8%, which in that low-turnout environment amounted to almost eleven-million votes. Hillary beat the Donald by nearly three-million. Third-party candidates took close to eight-million more.
Think about it.
Trump is president? Does anyone believe an injustice was done that ought to be set right?
Well, I do, for one.
According to some folks who once counted themselves among his closest friends (Michael Cohen and Tony Schwarz), Donald Trump will never relinquish power.
Are we going to believe them?
What if they’re right?
The slow-train-coming election of 2020 is an excuse that both Democrats and Republicans are using for inaction and delay. Isn’t it obvious?
No one wants to take on the bosses. Oligarchs can get to anyone; they can get to families. It’s amazing what doors can close on people who choose not to cooperate with those who have shown that they are capable of anything at all.
Legislators and judges, prosecutors and bureaucrats are dragging their feet refusing to make the decisions that will save the republic. They want to ride out the clock hoping that DT will die of old-age; by some miracle, citizens will be set free perhaps to — someday, somehow — stand-up for their wonderful country.
Pipe dream?
As this essay is written, the Trump family makes their plans to rule America into perpetuity. Jerry Falwell Junior of Liberty University floated the absurd idea on Twitter that Trump be given an extra two years to make up for time lost during the “Witch Hunt.”
The pictures that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, seized from Falwell’s “pool-boy” had nothing whatever to do with Junior’s overly-supportive tweet anyhow. Everyone knows at least that part of the salacious story is true, right?
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
Seriously.
Jerry and Donald are soul-mates. Falwell admonishes his acolytes to conceal, carry, and train to kill Muslim attackers. What right-minded follower of Christ Jesus wouldn’t? Donald bears false witness by proving daily that slander, name-calling, and hitting back hardest is the way to win. With Jesus standing behind to egg them both, how can they not get their way in this world? On the way to the future they envision, they don’t lose.
The German Trump family intends to rule the world until the end of time, because the United States now stands at an historic threshold; it is perilously close to conquering the nearly 200 countries that make the community of nation-states. The Trumps intend to take advantage of an opportunity provided not even to Hitler; they will sit on a golden throne at the top of the world.
Who wants their kids admitted to a prestigious college?
Cooperate.
Who wants their kids to land big jobs?
Collaborate.
Who wants to live disease-free to the very end of a most pleasant retirement?
Capitulate.
These are the choices.
Is it possible to gain the whole world while keeping the nation’s soul safe and sound? Every Trump lunatic believes it is. Keep America First while undermining its constitution, its institutions, and its values; everything will fall into place like it should.
Folks who care about right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, fair-play and corruption must now make choices that will bring down a wall of concrete on themselves and the children they love.
The time is now.
The time is come.
It’s time for parents to eat their children.
It’s time to worship the Fuhrer.
Our ancestors fought a revolution so that their progeny wouldn’t be bullied — not by drug lords; nor by malignant kings who torture for kicks; nor by bubble-encapsulated queens who tell their starving subjects to eat cake whenever they are truly hungry; nor by heartless thugs who cage thousands of family-separated orphans to make the point that they won’t be disobeyed.
Our national heroes fought a revolution so that people might someday choose their leaders and through them their way of living. When the people finally got their chance, most stayed home. Those who chose — those who made an effort to choose — chose leaders who wanted only to rule in the cruelest ways imaginable.
Call people stupid while smiling down at them when they praise every crazy thing you do and say — it’s a living hell for the powerless; the irony is that the powerless come to love their supreme leader in time; abused people, like domesticated pets, learn to love and trust their masters, eventually.
The world is sliding into an abyss of unfairness and worse. It’s the way of history. Every generation of humans fails to make the world a place they would gladly take the chance to be born into a second time.
Only fools would choose to be born into a world of ten-billion suffering souls. What are the chances that anyone will be born into a happy place with safe food and water, loving friends, and fun things to do?
What are the chances?
A case can be made — I won’t make it — that the odds are near zero. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a weird irony if the wealthy and the cruel were born again strictly by chance not into Hell but rather into a second life on Earth — the same Earth they built and looted in their first life.
The catch is that they will not be allowed to choose their parents or on which continent they will live. The selection of their circumstances will be made by chance alone. A lottery determines their start in life, their potential, their possibilities.
It seems fair, doesn’t it?
Reasonable demographic analyses show that the prospects for a happy second-life are weighted heavily against them. A second-life lottery will ruin most of those unfortunates who are forced by their success to play it.
The situation in America today is one where most people are in blind denial of the calamity that has befallen them. No one wants to believe that the president is a dictator who they are powerless to resist. He is enabled by terrible people — cowards, most of them — who enjoy hurting people. Many aren’t Americans.
Some deluded folks have embraced the president. They, like the Germans of the 1930s, are oblivious to his evil ways. Many believe they themselves are good — blessed by a higher power — but they lust after evil as if it were as harmless as a whore. They embrace and cling, pant and sweat to divert their minds from a raging venereal assault that will surely overwhelm them on the day they finally understand that they have lost everything.
To vote in 2020 for or against the monster who torments us is as futile as it is dangerous. With help from the bad people, Donald Trump is going to crush America out of existence.
Even if everyone stays home, Donald Trump will say that the largest turnout in history gave him the greatest electoral victory ever.
Should he lose, he will deny the result and claim the election was rigged. He will not step down until he dies, no matter how many “traitors” step forward to question his version of the facts.
Most folks know on some level that the president is a liar and a father of lies. Will people allow themselves to be fooled again?
Boycotting the 2020 election means that “we the people” are choosing not to validate the politicians who refused to secure our elections; who redistricted away our ability to fix roads and other infrastructure; who trampled health care, food quality, and earning potential.
Boycotting the 2020 election will show the oligarchs that we have given up on the idea that things can be set right. Some folks, yes, refuse to believe they are victims; that they are chattel who lost the freedom to change society when Trump seized power.
We have to embrace realism. Billionaires are not our friends. Oligarchs are the enemy. We can’t challenge them, but we can puncture their collective illusion that the rest of us enjoy playing gladiator games in their stadiums.
Some might wonder why anyone would advocate boycott when the election is one-and-a-half years away. Well, the election is what the talking heads on billionaire-media obsess over.
No one talks about impeachment (except that it’s a bad idea), because Israeli, Russian, and the evangelical mob-bosses want Trump. It seems like an unlikely menage de trois until folks understand that bullies have a common interest — to exercise a humiliating power over little people.
Guess what?
If you are reading this essay, the chances are good that you are one of the little ones. The bosses who laugh at your antics don’t care about you or me at all.
Yes, we should let them speak for themselves — who can stop them? They advertise their warped values on every channel, station, and website! — but trust me, everyday folks like you and me share a dilemma: we are adrift in rowboats on a big ocean where unruly warships stream.
The battleships are not going to rescue anyone in a rowboat no matter how desperate their cries for help.
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who once worked for the CIA, told anyone who would listen, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
Dissent. Resist. Boycott.
In the face of a smothering totalitarianism paid for by the monied and the powerful, we have no other choice. Cooperation, capitulation, and collaboration will bring ordinary folks nothing but loathing and loss of self-respect.
Until “outlaws” who have paid their debt to society are allowed to vote free and fair, no one votes. A forgotten prophet once said: we are all outlaws in the eyes of America.
The wealthy live behind gates for a reason.
I am asking Americans to work hard between now and Election 2020 to make voter turnout low.
Set a record.
35% or less might become, maybe, someday, a distress-beacon that the historians of democracies do not ignore.
Everyone stands for something. Why not stand for what’s right? Or take a knee. In the fresh, clean air of freedom, every powerless person can make that choice.
Billy Lee