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More Millennials Would Give Up Voting Than Texting (nypost.com) 350

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post: As the staggering national student loan debt tally sits at an all-time high of $1.33 trillion, according to the Department of Education, many millennials say they would go to extreme lengths to wipe their slate clean. According to a new survey from Credible, a personal finance website, 50 percent of all respondents (ages 18-34) said they would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential elections in order to never have to make another loan payment again.
Yet only 44% said they'd be willing to give up Uber and Lyft -- and only 13% said they'd be willing to give up texting.
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More Millennials Would Give Up Voting Than Texting

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @10:50AM (#55209841)
    it's hard to think that way about voting. Our last election was Giant Douche vs a Turd Sandwich both of which were rammed down our throats.

    Thing is, you need to get people to show up to primaries, but it's hard enough to get them to mid terms. Voter suppression doesn't help matter either. I don't know about the rest of you folks but I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That wasn't an accident. Nor was it because of overwhelming turnout.
    • I think the biggest hurdle in the presidential election process is the fact you need millions of $$ in support to even compete against the binary shit we have today, putting spending/fundraising caps would largely fix a good deal of the process.

      The problem with career politicians is easy to fix, add term limits like presidents for house and senate seats (at the very least a 2 term limit for re-election on back to back elections).

      Get rid of lobbyist.

      Those three simple tihngs would solve most of the issues I

      • by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Just making your election system fair, along with campaign limits, would help a lot. Right now, between gerrymandering and voter suppression, politicians are pretty well guaranteed re-election. Unluckily, any changes would need to be at the Constitutional level.

    • Thing is, you need to get people to show up to primaries

      Because that did a fat lot of good for the democrats. Have it rigged from the start, accuse sanders supporters of throwing invisible chairs, ignore demands for manual counts that they are obligated to oblige, etc...

      • because it was still only a small number of (mostly old and conservative) people showing up for the primary. If the primaries had the same turnout as the General we'd be saying President Bernie right now because Clinton's shenanigans wouldn't have flown. You need tight margins for cheating to work in elections.
    • Yes, the 2016 Dem primaries were rigged, to a degree. The question is, what to do now? Bernie is using his energy to push reform on the Dems, to stop the rigging and allow a wave of fresh blood into the party. Others in his camp are trying to recruit him to form a third party. [draftbernie.org] And there are those who are trying to elect grassroots [brandnewcongress.org] candidates [justicedemocrats.com] at the state and local level, nationwide.

      Though you won't hear about it much on NPR or MSNBC, the progressive left is woke now, after last year's election. Just look at

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • The biggest hurdle, clearly, is explaining to people that it doesn't actually cost $7000 to repair a broken arm. In reality, it's a couple of hundred dollars in most cases.

          A child birth is not in excess of $20,000. $2,000.00 tops.

          The entire health care industry in the United States is massively over inflated.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      It helps if you think of elections, not as an exercise in self-expression, but an exercise in political power.

      You don't have to like or even approve of someone you vote for. It's *nice* when you can, but the point is to shape your future in the most advantageous way possible.

    • I don't know about the rest of you folks but I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That wasn't an accident. Nor was it because of overwhelming turnout.

      According to information known at the time and later leaked by WikiLeaks, it was likely because Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign was a victim of collusion between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC corporation. And if you read the (remarkable but predictably underreported) DNC lawsuit (CAROL WILDING et al. v DNC SERVICES CORPORATION, d

  • I'm surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @10:55AM (#55209861)

    I'm surprised that it's only 50%. Given that voter turnout in the average presidential election is only about 50-60% without extra incentives not to vote, it's hard to imagine that you couldn't come up with another 10% who would skip voting in exchange for a big pile of cash.

    • I'm surprised it's about student debt. Hell I'd give up my right to vote in exchange for an icecream. At least icecream will give me some temporary enjoyment, vs voting for who will attempt to fuck the country a bit more next time round.

  • I think this says more about the kabuki-show of voting in the US than it does about young people. Too many people 18-34 have figured out that voting has little or nothing to do with who ends up in power. You can vote for "outsiders" and "change agents" and you still end up with some guy from Goldman Sachs making decisions about your life while he flies his trophy wife to Fort Knox to perform some satanic sexual ritual over the gold during a total eclipse.

    Seriously, a show of hands: in an age of gerrymande

    • by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:21AM (#55209997)

      Seriously, a show of hands: in an age of gerrymandered, electoral colleged, voter suppressed, primary rigged, black box voting machine, foreign government influenced elections, where the guy who loses the vote gets to rule, who wouldn't give up their right to this meaningless exercise in exchange for the forgiveness of $100,000.00 in debt?

      On the other hand, pretty much nobody in the establishment wanted Trump to win, he spent a fraction of what Hilary spent on her campaign, and he won. Not saying he's a good candidate, but there isn't a 1:1 relationship between who the establishment wants, and who actually gets in.

      • On the other hand, pretty much nobody in the establishment wanted Trump to win, he spent a fraction of what Hilary spent on her campaign, and he won. Not saying he's a good candidate, but there isn't a 1:1 relationship between who the establishment wants, and who actually gets in.

        And yet, that same establishment is sitting down to eat at the feast.

        http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]

      • by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
        Look at who he has appointed to high ranking positions, people in the establishment.
    • I think this says more about the kabuki-show of voting in the US than it does about young people. Too many people 18-34 have figured out that voting has little or nothing to do with who ends up in power. You can vote for "outsiders" and "change agents" and you still end up with some guy from Goldman Sachs making decisions about your life while he flies his trophy wife to Fort Knox to perform some satanic sexual ritual over the gold during a total eclipse.

      Seriously, a show of hands: in an age of gerrymandered, electoral colleged, voter suppressed, primary rigged, black box voting machine, foreign government influenced elections, where the guy who loses the vote gets to rule, who wouldn't give up their right to this meaningless exercise in exchange for the forgiveness of $100,000.00 in debt?

      good points you have made (can't disagree at all.)

      But you still vote with your wallet. You tell the elite puppeteers what you think by not buying crap their company owns. Buy local, be local. Might not really matter either, but you are going to wear clothes, eat food, and talk to your friends anyway; you can think about those choices.

      • But you still vote with your wallet. You tell the elite puppeteers what you think by not buying crap their company owns.

        I agree, but "voting with your wallet" cannot touch the truly entrenched power structure. What products do I buy or not buy to prevent Goldman Sachs from running the government?

        Buy local, be local. Might not really matter either, but you are going to wear clothes, eat food, and talk to your friends anyway; you can think about those choices.

        Absolutely.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, maybe having more realistic expectations might be a good start.

      I think the people who voted for Donald Trump actually got what they voted for: an outsider not steeped in the Washington way of doing things who had little personal or political connection to the people down there. What they went wrong wasn't in judging Trump's character, but in judging what such a character would be able to accomplish.

      The problem with electing someone who is untainted with the Establishment is that the establishment are

    • who wouldn't give up their right to this meaningless exercise in exchange for the forgiveness of $100,000.00 in debt?

      I'd happily give it up for a small fraction of that.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:07AM (#55209931)

    What's the point of voting when the electoral college makes your vote irrelevant?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:39AM (#55210079)

      The states elect the president. Your state elected your candidate. Your candidate couldn't convince enough states.

      Your vote is only relevant in your state. How do you not understand this?

      • by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Sunday September 17, 2017 @09:40AM (#55213925)

        The Electoral College is not the Senate. The intention was a pseudo-popular vote, because the number of Electoral College votes is primarily tied to the number of House seats. But we stopped expanding the House in the 1910s. So now the 750,000 people per House district in California have the same representation as the 500,000 people in Wyoming.

        That is not at all what was intended. What was intended [wikipedia.org] was 100,000 people per House district. That would have resulted in an Electoral College that was far closer to the popular vote. Even if we had kept with the 200,000 people per district we had when the House stopped expanding, we would have had an Electoral College far closer to the popular vote.

    • Vote third party to send a message.

      Let's be honest, in a country of this size, your vote is only worth about 1/150,000,000 even if the electoral college is gone.
      If you want real power, real power comes from convincing people to vote on your side. That's what Trump did, and he somehow did it rather well.
      • Yeah because on the scale of at least having a vote counted, vs having all your debt forgiven the correct answer is to throw away both options!

        The USA will never receive the message without preferential voting. Literally no one in either party cares if you piss your vote against the wall by "sending a message".

    • by areusche ( 1297613 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @12:07PM (#55210227)
      The real and honest question here is why no one remembers the reasons for why we have an electoral system. This is an absolute failing of our education system and the thousands of teachers who teach civics. Seriously, our system of government isn't that complicated. You and every other citizen's vote goes towards telling a singular individual how to vote (the elector). The system was set up as a checks and balances system to keep the US policy from being dictated by people in large cities. A concern of the more rural colonists who signed up for this back in the 18th century. It's why America is a country that spans an entire continent and is a modern empire as opposed to Europe which is a has been in every sense of the phrase if not an outright vassal state.
      • The system was set up as a checks and balances system to keep the US policy from being dictated by people in large cities.

        No, it wasn't. Well, preventing the people from large states (not cities) from dictating the choice was a small part of the rationale, but claiming it was the whole thing is like claiming that your house has plumbing so you can brush your teeth. Here's a decent (brief) overview of that rationale for and evolution of the electoral college: http://uselectionatlas.org/INF... [uselectionatlas.org].

      • For a pedant, you're pretty wrong. First, your vote does absolutely nothing to "tell an elector" how to vote. What it does is select which elector will be casting a vote. Separate state laws may threaten an elector who doesn't vote for whomever he pledged to, but whether those are enforceable is in question and the penalties tend towards cosmetic only. Second, everyone votes for a "slate" of electors, minimum of three.

        So, just in case you're wondering, I have problems with literally every word of "telli

  • 50 percent of all respondents (ages 18-34) said they would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential elections in order to never have to make another loan payment again.

    When put like that it sounds bad.

    But when you turn it around it's a damn good deal. The average student debt in the US is about $37,000. If you asked the population in general whether they would give up 2 presidential votes in exchange for $37k I expect that way over 50% of the voting public would snatch it out of your hand.

    And when you consider that the youngest adults will be the ones with the highest debt, they would be the most "expensive" ones to buy-off.

  • ...and these are the muppets we are entrusting the future to.

    They'll be far too distracted with trivial shit like facetwit, far too worried about their online popularity, and far too leftie/peecee passive to ever do what it takes to defend important stuff like rights/freedoms. Goodbye constitution, hello slavery.

  • I'm a Californian (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:38AM (#55210075) Homepage

    My vote has never meant anything in presidential elections anyway, and never will. It only has half the theoretical electoral college weight of a voter in other states to begin with, and it's a single party state with a winner take all electoral vote system so there's never any doubt about the outcome. So I'll gladly give up that farce for $10, as long as I can continue voting on everything else.

  • I hacked the voting machine to send my texts!
  • I've never taken a loan, what does that poll question even mean? Is the premise that I'm going to be able to borrow a billion dollars, invest it, and retire living off the interest because I'll only have to pay off the principal?

    That only 50% of people would give up voting for that kind of power is astounding.

    I think there is a serious discussion hidden in there, voting is a social responsibility, not an act for which you derive personal benefit. How much personal cost people are willing to endure in order

  • I know a young woman, married, just became pregnant, who very adamantly will tell you "I'm not political, not at all, I don't care about any of it". Especially since she just gave me the news that she's pregnant, there's something very important I'd like to tell her:

    I understand why it is that politics turns you off, but there's something you need to consider, especially since you're going to be a mother soon: There are plenty of people out there who do care to make their wishes known so far as what direction our country will go and how it's run -- and they do not care if you're happy about the results or even what happens to you and your family, so long as they get what they want. There are people out there right now who would see you disenfranchised entirely, merely because you're a woman, make it illegal for you to have your own money, own property, run a business, and considered the 'property' of your husband, who would have the legal right to do with you as he wished -- including beating and killing you, if he felt justified. Do you really want to live in a country like that? Do you want your children to inherit a world like that? That's why you need to care about 'politics': so that your voice, and the voices of everyone who thinks and feels the way you do about things, can be heard, so those who represent you in Congress can work to enact the Will of the People, all the people, not just the rich and the power-hungry. You do it for yourself, you do it for your kids, and their kids, and so on. The alternative is to live like a slave, having no say whatsoever in the course your life takes, because The Few speak while The Many are silent -- or silenced. It doesn't matter if it's something as small as some inconsequential little local ordinance that your city is voting on, or as big as who is President, you either exercise your right to make your wishes known, or someone else will see their wishes enforced on you.

  • While it may not be how our founding fathers envisioned things, the people in power are quite content with how things are turning out.

    Disenfranchise so many voters that they simply don't even care about it anymore. Make voting as painful and unpleasant as possible with absolutely no reward. Make it seem utterly pointless. Also ensure that every campaign promise remains unfilled and forgotten, so people feel totally conned and don't bother in the next election.

    All is as it is supposed to be, according to

  • Dear US Americans,
    I tried to express my concern regarding your countries condition in a polite way, but that would have included a lengthly discussion of indicators which no one would have read. Therefore, in short: You are so fucked!

    While other countries support their students with a basic income and allow them to study free of charge, you have to pay for it. In addition you seem not to have learned critical thinking at school, college and university otherwise you would not depend on Uber but disregard vot

  • Just let the millennials vote by texting, problem solved.

    Of course some may argue that this will make voting insecure, but with electronic voting machines, it already is.

  • Things people do in text messages have a direct, verifiable impact on their personal lives. Leaving aside the whole Electoral College system point, the President is only a single branch of the government, and the least important one IMHO. Changes in the head of state may create ripples that down the line impact me personally, but for the most part I see very little difference in my prosperity when the President changes from a D to an R. Changes in Congress have a bigger role because they actually make laws,

  • Free communications (beer and speech) is more important than the vote.

  • so i guess, it's just fair if the millennials are confused about how this democracy stuff works.

  • Vote local .... (Score:4, Informative)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @04:54PM (#55211449) Journal

    Sounds like a lot of other Slashdot readers already get this, but the votes that matter most are for the people geographically closest to where you live.

    The people we voted in as our city council members and mayor have already made more decisions that impact my life than anything Trump has done.

    The President in America is only slightly less of a figurehead than than Queen of England, and that's been by design since the nation was founded. If you visit the Old Courthouse in Annapolis, MD - you can see the original letter General George Washington wrote when he declined the offer to become the first King of the USA, right after the Revolutionary War. He felt that control of the nation shouldn't be in the hands of just one individual like that, and just wanted to go back to farming his land. He wound up our first President, instead, by a unanimous vote.

    When you really look back at the claimed "big accomplishments" of past Presidents, much of it had more to do with advisors and other staff members putting the ideas forward and convincing the President to get behind them. Ronald Reagan's "trickle down economics" was a great example. He didn't come up with that idea himself. He wasn't even a Finance guy ... just a former Hollywood actor. In other cases, we don't really know if a President really had a plan themselves or not -- but we do know that many changes they make just get watered down or reversed within a decade's time. (President Clinton was famous for his "welfare to work" policy, where he mandated time limits on how long welfare could be collected. In the years that followed, the states slowly dismantled that with exceptions to rules and changes - so today, none of that has any effect on how the system works.) Obama's presidency made a lot of claims about improving our economic and employment conditions - yet historically, we know the economy is cyclical. If you have a boom, you have a bust that follows it, and vise-versa. Become a president when the economy is poor and just hang in there, and you'll eventually be able to take credit for the inevitable turn-around.

    I don't want to discount Presidential voting as irrelevant ... but choosing wisely in the Primaries is where you really get more control over who wins. By the time you're at the general election, you've literally got over a dozen contenders who didn't make it -- quite often for the wrong reasons. (Candidates with well known names often get automatic advantages over people nobody has heard of. And candidates pouring more money into trying to win the election can make some of the others look bad for just long enough to bump them out of the running. Reality might be that those "also rans" were actually more qualified candidates all along.)

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