Saikat Chakrabarti Quotes

From the standpoint of democratic legitimacy, it's a problem if half the electorate, or close to it, declines to vote, not least because they may not feel much of a stake in the whole process.

All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.

I don't think everyone should vote. If you have to be dragged into the polls, carried into the polls and smelling salts have to be used, you probably shouldn't be voting. However, we shouldn't be putting up barriers to voting that target certain groups.

And for far too long, the Democrats have had a monopoly on black votes in this country.

There's an old rule of thumb in politics that 90 percent of all 90 year-olds vote and 25 percent of all 25 year-olds vote.

The poor don't vote all the time.

It's too bad that such crowds can't be turned out in the United States.

Hopeless people do not vote. They don’t think that they can change anything anymore.

It's so deeply disturbing to me that half of the eligible voters don't vote in this country. We talk about how divided the country is. The truth is, we don't even know. We just know what the half that voted thought.

For too many years, those eligible to vote in primary or general elections did not bother to do so. Those sensible centrists who do not go to rallies but care deeply about our country effectively silenced their own voices. That sent the message to incumbents that they were either doing the right thing or that we just did not care.

Not voting is not a protest. It is a surrender.

For our white members, voting is something they have done for hundreds of years. But for us, it is not such a traumatic thing, because we have never participated in an election.

The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters.

In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.

The more that voting is glorified as a panacea, the more lackadaisical people become about preserving their constitutional rights.

I don't vote and I got nothing to do with it.

A growing number of people in this country do not believe that it makes a real difference who is elected President of the United States.

First they gerrymander us into one-party fiefs. Then they tell us they only care about the swing districts. Then they complain about voter apathy

The democracy gap in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the least worst every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the least worst gets worse.

Don’t vote. it only encourages the bastards.

The political graveyards are full of people who don't respond.

I'm baffled by the people who say, 'I'm just not going to vote.'

It's a shame and a disgrace that so few people take part in the political process.

Republicans need to stop complaining about blacks voting over 90% for Democrats. If they're not willing to compete in those neighborhoods, they will keep losing those voters.

Why did we lose Brexit? Why, because 60 per cent of youth didn't believe they needed to go and vote.