Even in the last presidential election, just 56 percent of could-be voters showed up to the polls. In fact, in hundreds of counties around the U.S., the number of eligible individuals who did not vote far outweighed the number of ballots actually cast for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016. If those millions of no-shows had picked “nobody” on the ballot—the effective choice of their abstention—“nobody” would have won in a landslide.
That is the message of a striking map created by amateur cartographer Philip Kearney in April 2018, which was expanded upon by Jim Herries, an Esri cartographer, last week. Drawing on Census Bureau data and election results, “United States of Apathy” compares those no-show votes to the actual turnout for both presidential candidates in the 2016 election, and adds up the electoral votes that would have been produced. “Nobody” wins 445 electoral votes, a victory of several factors over Trump’s 21 and Clinton’s 72. (Again, that’s if they were actually running against a no-show candidate. In reality, Trump won the electoral college with 304 votes while Clinton lost it with 227, despite winning the popular vote.) In the updated version, Herries has added a series of interactive maps that detail where the pluralities of “apathetic” voters played to the advantage of both candidates, and by what margin, across the 50 states. Dive in here.
While surveys of no-show voters in 2016 indicate a lack of interest in the candidates or issues at hand, it may not be fair to pin the cause of America’s low turnout rates entirely to apathy. Some voters are disillusioned with what they see as the inefficacy of the political system; others may live far from polling places and lack transportation access; still more may prefer to prioritize their jobs or families. And voter suppression efforts—be they photo ID requirements, late registration penalties, last-minute poll closures or schedule changes, or voter roll purges—keep an untold number of Americans away from the ballots. So do problems that arise when people do show up to vote, including long lines and malfunctioning machines.
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