Another election, and with some exceptions, another low voter turnout.
But perhaps the problem is not that we vote too little, but that we are voting too often. Voting is, after all, a particular form of choosing, and you can reverse that to state that all choices are a form of voting.
And when you think about it in those terms it becomes clear that our lives these days demand that we do a lot of voting.
All our consumption choices — clothing, entertainment and food — are available to us as a range of options drawn from a pan-global spectrum of alternatives. Or consider, for example, the purchase of a phone. It used to be to that you contacted something called The Phone Company and they literally hooked you up. That was it. Now acquiring a phone -- between choosing make, model, features and data plan -- is, according to some experts, the most complex financial decision a consumer can make.
Back in the days when voter turnout was higher there were people like pension fund managers or travel agents who made informed decisions on our behalf. Now we live in the age of the empowered consumer, which is another way of saying that we’re on our own.