1 - No national election day holiday, so wage-earners often have to forgo income to vote.
2 - Long lines, too few voting stations, exacerbate point 1
3 - Inconsistent voting laws as you cross municipal boundaries (mostly state to state).
3b - particularly WRT mail-in/absentee ballots.
4 - constant undermining of the voting system as a whole by the GOP. This has really ramped up in the last ~8 years, but it's been there much longer.
The first 3 are more likely to impact poorer citizens, who are also more likely to rent their homes.
We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting.
Mostly, I don't think we should be encouraging a ton of people to all show up at the same place at the same time. That's just asking for long lines and other issues.
I think it'd be much better to just drag voting out of the course of a month and actually encourage people to not show up on election day. Or to just vote by mail more, I haven't been a poll since I was a child (and back then we had levers!) but from what I hear now half the time you're just filling out a mail ballet in person now.
Nine of that applies to a Democratic-run state with mail-in-only voting.
This is visible in county-level voting rates. The counties east of the Cascade mountains tend to be more conservative than the counties west of the Cascades, or areas surrounding metros like Spokane, and they also tend to have lower voter participation rates.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/15/where-peo...
From what I see WA had a turnout of 75% compared to USA's 66%.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h_2pR1pq8s_I5buZ5agX...
PSA: You can register as a poll worker and work election day to guarantee you have time to vote. There's a high chance that your work will give you the time off to go work as a poll worker without it eating into your PTO (and you get paid to boot!).
As an ex-linecook, LOL, there are too many assumptions baked in here to be in the realm of reality for working class jobs
1st you are assuming people have one employer to worry about, not multiple.
2nd you are assuming people have a set schedule daily or weekly.
3rd you are assuming people have PTO.
4th you are assuming the employer will give any amount of shit about volunteerism.
5th you are assuming they won't be given a point or docked for missing a shift.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/561886-whos-not-voting-...
This is however contrasted by the confusing bit that not being registered was the biggest reason people didn’t vote, above apathy and political disengagement.
And it seems likely they didn't make the (often minimal) effort to get registered because of apathy or political disengagement.
What did it look like for you to get registered to vote?
Yes, it is harder for renters, but it is designed to be harder. This is to prevent renters from having political power and making homeowner's houses more expensive. One more reason to fight, from my point of view.
1) Some people are under more stress than others, and are less able to summon the effort to vote. Admittedly, this does also include people in rather different circumstances, such as elderly homeowners who become unwell at election time (especially after the postal vote deadline).
2) Voting arrangements aren't uniform between countries (or even within one country), and travelling some distance to a polling station and then queuing to vote is a burden some voters might experience much more than others.
