Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book addresses the issue of why 51.2% of the population of the USA failed to vote in the November 1996 presidential election. Through polls and studies conducted in the spring and summer of 1996, the contributors set out to answer the following questions: what were the 51.2 percent doing that day? Who are they? Why didn't they vote? The results are summarized into five types of nonvoters: doers, unplugged, irritable, don't knows and alienated.
Irritables
Irritables
Cynicism and disenchantment are hallmarks of Irritable nonvoters. Just as important, however, are their habits of keeping informed politically while believing their opinions are not valued by those in power. Like some Doers, a number of Irritables believe they are making a political statement by not voting—by, in effect, withholding their votes.
Henry Montoya is the classic example, going to the election booth and pulling the lever on a blank ballot for the past 20 years. Now 68 years old, he's switched his attention from the two parties to political extremist Lyndon LaRouche.
Extreme action, he believes, is the only way to fix a system that has become beholden to moneyed interests and impervious to those in need of help, such as minorities.
But he doesn't want ...
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