No one votes, so how is our government representational?

With the prospect of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and the Republican candidates descending to California in June for a late primary that was never meant or thought to be important, it might be time for California voters, to wake up and find a ballot box.

Voter turnout in the United States for the 2014 midterm election was an abysmal 36 percent. In California, only eight percent – eight percent – of eligible millennials cast a ballot.

An oft-cited excuse for lack of participation in the democratic process is that California leans so democratic that voting is pointless, because the election is a foregone conclusion. For several reasons, this is problematic. Each election, the ballot has important initiatives, which are the people’s only method of self-determination and self-representation. They feature local campaigns, which are often competitive, crossing party lines, and form the people’s most direct form of representation. When we stay home, our government is incomplete. It’s not representational.

But most importantly, voting...it’s sort of our job.

I hear all the time from people that they had no idea there was an election when we weren’t picking a president. I hear that none of the candidates inspired them, or that “the system is corrupt” so why bother.

Bernie Sanders and his followers have been talking up a “political revolution, where millions of people rise up to take back their government from what he calls the “billionaire class”. Guess what. The revolution hasn’t happened this time. Turnout is down over 25 percent from 2008 within the Democratic Party primary, when Barack Obama turned out a record coalition. Many blame this phenomenon a lack of media coverage of Sanders’ candidacy, but that argument, in my opinion, is a bit suspect when considering Bernie has raised and spent nearly $140 million, mostly on television advertisements.

Honestly, if we haven’t heard of Bernie Sanders at this point, the problem isn’t the media or even the candidate. The problem is probably us! Information is at our disposal whenever we want it, at our fingertips. We make time for what we think is important. These campaigns, all of the candidates, have been covered to death.

I hear many people, especially people my age, come up with lazy and cynical excuses and despite the stakes of this election, we make excuses for why we’re staying home, because we can “never, ever vote for Hillary,” or “never, ever vote for Bernie,” for reasons that we don’t truly understand. Many of us millennials have “never ever” voted for anyone, despite being eligible to vote in multiple elections, and statistically, Millenials are much more likely to have been arrested than voting in the last election. Think about that.

It is time for a political revolution, but it’ll take is a truly informed vote. From all of us.

-Sean Eckhardt