Nearly 100 million eligible U.S. voters chose not to exercise the franchise. Why not? What can be done to change that? Who would they vote for if they participated?
These are among the questions I explored for POLITICO earlier this year, when the Knight Foundation released the largest ever study of American non-voters. And yesterday I joined National Public Radio’s “1A” program to discuss what I learned and why it matters.
You can hear the full show — which is produced at WAMU in Washington, DC — via this link. Guests include Emory University’s Bernard Fraga and Kat Calvin of Spread the Vote.
Callers asked about Ranked Choice Voting and I mentioned a bit about the experience here in Maine, which adopted it for federal elections before the 2018 midterms. Here’s another POLITICO story I wrote about that.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.