People With Higher Education Vote More Often

These are my theories

Today, we voted for our municipality elections that occur once every four years — not a lot of people take the time to actually go and vote over here.

Only around 50% of the people that could vote actually showed up in 2018 and the current expected turnout today is around 30% — but that could still increase today.

That made me wonder why the voter turnout is so low, and what surprised me is that people with higher education vote more often.

Usually these people are interested in politics and have good paying jobs.

The people that don’t have that, they’re basically among the poorest part of the country — and in that group of people, the voter turnout isn’t as high as the ‘well-earning’ group of people.

My theory about this is as follows.

Lower educated people with lower salaries don’t trust governments and politics anymore — they don’t believe that their voice matters.

That’s one, but there’s another one.

In my municipality, there are many small villages around our city and not as many polling stations — people typically have to travel for around 5–6 kilometers to vote.

Although it isn’t that far, people might not want to take the time to go there, which I completely understand — I’m 5 minutes away from a polling station and if I lived around an hour away from one I probably wouldn’t be voting either.

Even though I’m very political nowadays.

In these situations where only 30–50% of the population votes, there’s a lot to win, every vote counts for two at that moment so voting does really impact your area — especially with these regional elections.

Rich People Policies

One of the things that happens when the majority of the people that votes are the richer ones is that the elected will probably resonate with their ideas and their incomes.

So not voting as someone who has little to spend is probably only making things worse because.

All those green environmental ideas of some politicians are nice, but not for the people that can’t afford that — or just don’t want it.

What we need is a voting duty, which means that everyone that is eligible to vote, must vote — requiring for the local governments to make sure that everybody can vote by putting polling stations everywhere.

This makes sure these people are represented in the councils and governments.

The Old Guys vs. The Youngsters

This is something that has been an uprising trend for the last couple of years, old people versus the younger ones.

More and more young people are eligible to vote and the political spectrum is shifting massively — so that means that politics in general are shifting as well, in the direction of those new people that are going to vote.

Old people tend to vote what they’ve always voted instead of going for something new, I see this a lot here — but parties and political ideas change, the Democratic Party in the U.S. isn’t the same as it was 50 years ago.

Just like the GOP, this happens everywhere around the world.

People need to adapt to new ideas, or stick to old ones if you think that’s best, but at least know what your party is doing at the moment — not 50 years ago.