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Why I am not voting for president in 2020

Kent Kroeger
10 min readMay 26, 2020

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By Kent R. Kroeger (May 26, 2020)

A wooden ballot box used in the northeastern United States circa 1870 (Photo by Smithsonian Institute)

I stopped counting at 50 — the number essays that came up in Google when I searched on “Why I am not voting…”

And that was after filtering down to essays focused on not voting for president, as opposed to not voting for a particular candidate or party.

So when I decided to write this essay, I knew I wouldn’t say anything new or novel. And that is not my intent.

Rather, I believe the more people who extend their voice into the public arena about their disaffection with the American political system by posting on Medium.com, Facebook, Twitter, or their personal websites, the stronger our message to the two major parties and the news media will be that our political system doesn’t represent our interests or values well enough to inspire voting.

In writing this, I understand that the news media and the social media platforms consciously choose to exclude voices outside their definition of the mainstream. [To be fair, this has been the case since the invention of the movable metal type printing press. Gutenberg printed the Bible after all — what was more mainstream in 15th-century Europe than that?]

Facebook explicitly bans paid ads that suggest voting is useless or advise people not to vote, under the justification…

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Kent Kroeger
Kent Kroeger

Written by Kent Kroeger

I am a survey and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion (You can contact me at: kroeger98@yahoo.com)

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