this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
675 points (81.3% liked)
Political Memes
6256 readers
2400 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I cut off the VEP because I mistook the voting age population for the voting eligible population and now that you pointed that out (thank you by the way) I’m looking into why there’s such a difference between those two numbers.
Its people that have lost the right/ability to vote. Most likely due to the terrible american for profit prison system.
It’s also a metric that isn’t included with the numbers before 1984 which makes it difficult to use as a comparison.
It was not included before it was invented, it was also not needed as the level of voter disenfranchisement was not yet an issue. It is now the standard metric (since you guys have so many people that are barred from voting).
In the chart I originally posted see how six of the eight don’t have VEP?
Explains why when you use it, it goes from eighth to second.
It only does that if you sort by VAP, and that metric just does not hold up when an estimated 4.4 million adults can not vote. But these are all issues that neither party cared to address for the last 40 years so I don't think anyone can claim the high horse.
If you look at the the 1960 (JFK vs Nixon) then maybe if they had VEP then it could have been another barn burner to compare.
Your first source shows over twenty million.
It also shows 94% of the VAP are VEP in 1980 vs 92% in 2024 so I don’t think using VAP as a metric to include twenty-four elections instead of twelve with VEP is unreasonable.
That is a trend that is not good. It shows more people losing the ability to vote. I would say something needs to be done, but like I said, its been 40 years of both parties not doing anything about it. And now? Not even sure if you will have another election this free.