Democracy: The government where its most praised practice is also the most dangerous one.

Voting is arguably the best thing that democratic government's have to offer. It allows its citizens a voice and is fair; or so we think.

The fairness in democracy comes when a majority (by this I mean 75% or more) of the citizenry vote and even then we are cutting it close. But why isn't democracy fair if only 40% of people vote? Consider this, in a nation of 300 million people where almost 240 million people are eligible to register to vote only 59% of those people register to vote in 2014 according to the US Census Bureau. From this only 38.5% actually voted, meaning that only around 92,400,000 people made decisions for the whole 300 million. All of this data can be found here under Table 2 All Races.

Now granted that the US is a large country and 92 million looks like a large number to most so they may just brush it off and say that its 'not that big of a deal,' well they are wrong.

Lets look at the county in which I came from and look at voter turnout over specific election cycles to maybe identify a pattern.

	Presidential Primary	Regular Elections (May)	Primary (August)	General
2008	15.68%	4.83%	13.58%	63.78%
2012	13.73%	12.56%	16.42%	60.85%
2016	31.15%	N/A	N/A	N/A

Above is data collected from Genesee County elections over the past 8 years (provided by the Genesee County Clercks Office) and shows the percentage of registered voters that voted in each of the different elections that occur during the year. These number can be pulled from there summaries that can be found here.

To give a general idea about how few people are actually voting in the county here are some other facts to note:

• As of 2013 there were 415,376 people residing in Genesee County
• There were an average of 336,000 registered voters during the elections above

With these facts here are the conclusions that we can raise about Genesee county elections:

1. On average there is a 15.42% voter turnout in elections that are not the general presidential election.
2. Regular Elections have the lowest average turnout.
3. With the average at 15.42%, this means that on average about 51,816 make the decisions for a county with a population over 400,000. 
4. There are irregularities in the voting habits that could cause issues (will be discussed at a later time). 

I am done throwing facts around now and would like to start getting to the point. The point of the matter is that democracy is failing. It is failing because the representative democracy that is in place is heavily based on the voter turnout and when there are few people turning out to vote it causes a democratic failure. 

It is a failure because we have such a small percentage of the eligible population voting and ultimately making decisions for the whole group. It would be like taking a group of 100 people and saying "15 of you make all the decisions for the group and the rest of you have to go along with what they say." This does not sound like a fair system but in reality this is how voting affects our government when there is such a low turnout. 

Now I am not the biggest fan of Jean-Jaques Rousseau, however, when talking about representative democracies gives us an insight into the dangers associated with these governments. In his work called 'On Social Contract' Rousseau said, “the moment a people gives itself representatives, it is no longer free; it no longer exists." 

What Rousseau is trying to point out is that we are striving to find ways to make our democracies work on a larger scale and this idea that the people can vote for people, who vote on decisions that were introduced most of the time by people that were voted into public office is a bad idea. Its a bad idea because outside of us electing those people into office we have very little say in the decisions they make over the course of their terms. 

When Rousseau says that when we give ourselves representatives we are no longer free in a sense he is right. He is telling us that our laws, codes, guides, whatever are outside of out hands. Also whats to stop those elected officials from getting together and seizing the rest of the power in general? 

Now that was a big jump from just looking at statistics to talking about the morality and functionality of a representative democracy through the eyes of Rousseau, however, these two are intertwined but that is a conversation for a different time.