People often say that non-voters are refusing to participate in democratic elections. But that is only if you believe that American elections are legitimately democratic. In my opinion, our election system is plagued by a broken mass media and unverifiable vote-count results during elections.

In my last article at Democracy Chronicles, “On Viable Political Parties: What Can We Do Now?“, I gave an example of what a verifiable vote-count would look like. As I said in that article, a completely secure and verifiable balloting (machine or otherwise) and vote-counting is easily achievable. And because it’s easily-achievable, there’s no excuse to not have it.

The other problem, of course is that we don’t have anything even close to honest, open and participatory mass media. For example, the corporate mass-media, including pseudo-progressive NPR, never mentions the Green Party, the Justice Party, or any party other than the Democrats and Republicans. The mass media never mention any policy proposals other than those of the Republocrats or even policy proposals differing significantly from those currently in effect. Even interviews of the many people who are against the very circumscribed policies of our media never air, including on NPR.

People who want more humane policies that are fair to the ordinary (non-rich) person and who want more honest officeholders than what we have now are called progressives. Progressives are more numerous than you might think if you were only judging based on TV or NPR. They should be heard in the media and have a share of broadcast-time and print-space proportional to their numbers. Instead, the continue without acknowledging the existence of the policy changes that so many people want.

That’s why so few people vote.

Progressives are right about the possibility of a split-vote when they vote for progressive parties if they worry about taking votes from a Democrat. But that doesn’t matter unless you think the Democrat is worth electing or any different from the Republicans. If I vote progressive, my vote isn’t taken from the Democrat, because I assure you that he never would have had it, even if only he and the Republican were in the election. If progressives vote for the candidates of their favorite progressive party, they would be ready when the day comes that progressive votes, as a whole, add up to a majority. Only then will we progressives know that we have a win.