Marketing and Voting

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Marketing and Voting

or…

Why America doesn’t vote

Today is November 6th and if you live in the United States, you know what that means. . . or do you?

It is election day.

And you know what will happen tonight besides counting the votes? The talking heads on radio and TV will have this discussion centering around:

How many people voted
How many people could have voted
The decline in the number of people who vote
How we could get more people to vote

So, I’m going to jump right to the end of the day here and tell you. Less people voted than could have. There is a decline in the number of people. And, in fact, if you look at the statistics over time, the easier we’ve made it for people to vote, the fewer people vote.

Why is that?

Every great marketer knows that one of the great motivators people have is scarcity. Once you tell people there is a limited quantity, or suggest the same, more people what the item or want to participate in the event.

Ever seen these line:

Act now, quantities are limited.
The last time we held a sale like this, we sold out in 3 days.
Join our members only club. (Scarcity with a twist of being part of an exclusive club.)

What we have systematically done with our voting is taken away the scarcity and exclusivity. Because of that, it no longer feels like a privilege, it feels like a chore. Who wants to do chores today?

There’s talk now of moving the voting day from Tuesday to some other day of the week because it is to inconvenient to vote on Tuesday. Hmm, if we make it easier to vote, maybe more people will vote? Ya think? Really?

Not only have we made it so easy to vote that we no longer see it as a privilege, we also have people voting who shouldn’t. We won’t see this so much during this election season. But, every time we have a presidential election it becomes very obvious.

“Oh, I had no idea my vote for the president didn’t count as one vote. What do you mean I was voting for a representative on the Electoral College? What’s that?”

Com’on, I couldn’t graduate from High School until I could pass a test on the state constitution or the federal constitution. You didn’t know that?

So, he’s my solution to the lack of voters. Make voting harder.

The founding fathers had the right idea. Only land owning males could vote. Why was this? Because if you owned land, they figured you probably had an education sufficient enough to be informed enough to make a good decision on who should represent you in government.

Now, I realize we’ll never get that far back and limiting to just land owners will probably never fly. But, how about being able to pass a multiple choice test on federal, state and local government?

Would that eliminate a few people from the voting ranks? Yep. Would it make the rest of us take voting seriously? Yep. Would it be fair? I guess that depends on what you consider fair. If fair means that anyone can vote who wants to, why not let my 11 year old vote? I think limiting who can vote based on what they know about what they are voting for actually gets back to what the founding fathers had in mind. In that sense, it’s fair.

We have people voting who know less than my 11 year old. Yet, they can vote and he can’t. Something’s real wrong with the system when people who shouldn’t be voting are, people who should be voting are, and our only solution seems to be to make it even easier for the people who shouldn’t be voting.

del.icio.us Tags: elections , voting , marketing