What If Nobody Voted?

La Russell, Mo., has reached a sort of nirvana in terms of low-turnout elections: The town held an election and literally nobody voted:

Now, as I have noted, not everybody should vote in every election; undoubtedly, some of the people in La Russell had no knowledge or opinion about the questions on the ballot, and chose rationally to stay home. But extremely low-turnout elections are bad, and you clearly cannot run a democracy if nobody votes. The problem in La Russell seems to have been that nobody really knew there was an election on. One obvious reason for that: The election was held in April. The scheduling of elections at odd times of the year is an extreme case of the tendency to hold elections that are designed to reduce turnout. As a 2015 FiveThirtyEight analysis concluded:

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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La Russell, Mo., has reached a sort of nirvana in terms of low-turnout elections: The town held an election and literally nobody voted:

Now, as I have noted, not everybody should vote in every election; undoubtedly, some of the people in La Russell had no knowledge or opinion about the questions on the ballot, and chose rationally to stay home. But extremely low-turnout elections are bad, and you clearly cannot run a democracy if nobody votes. The problem in La Russell seems to have been that nobody really knew there was an election on. One obvious reason for that: The election was held in April. The scheduling of elections at odd times of the year is an extreme case of the tendency to hold elections that are designed to reduce turnout. As a 2015 FiveThirtyEight analysis concluded: