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Originally posted by Sasha.
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely agree. But if a state has decided to use the caucus system and then allow absentee votes then they might as well just go for a primary. It's the combination I find stupid, not the actual absentee votes.
While we're talking about voting - why is the turnout generally low even in the GE (if you know)? Is there a historical explanation or? Maybe it's the two party system?
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I get where you're coming from, but even in primary states, just like in the general election, several allow for early voting as well. New York, an upcoming primary is one of those states. Not every state, like you mentioned, allows for early voting; and that goes for both primaries and caucus states alike.
As for voting turnout. It's so weird and also sad, we as a nation, we probably have some of the lowest national voting turnout rates in the US compared to other major countries around the world.
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All that electoral activity got us wondering: How does voter turnout in the U.S., regularly decried as dismal, compare with other developed democracies? As is so often the case, the answer is a lot more complicated than the question.
Political scientists typically measure turnout by looking at votes cast as a percentage of eligible voters. Since many hard-to-measure factors can affect eligibility (citizenship, imprisonment, residency rules and other legal barriers), in practice turnout calculations usually are based on the estimated voting-age population. By that measure, the U.S. lags most of its peers, landing 31st among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, most of whose members are highly developed, democratic states.
U.S. turnout in 2012 was 53.6%, based on 129.1 million votes cast for president and an estimated voting-age population of just under 241 million people. Among OECD countries, the highest turnout rates were in Belgium (87.2%), Turkey (86.4%) and Sweden (82.6%). Switzerland consistently has the lowest turnout, with just 40% of the voting-age population casting ballots in the 2011 federal legislative elections, the most recent.
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http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...ped-countries/
