Housing and voting turnout

Sharing a house, unit or flat is NEVER like being in the TV series "Friends". The reality often involves household disputes and personality clashes, invasions of personal space, abuses based on misunderstanding of law (e.g., searching other people's possessions for drugs), and so on. Those people who do think sharing house is always - or even mostly -  a wonderful, or even a tolerable, experience, lack life experience. When they - and this includes politicians, economists, and other IPOCs who make assumptions about people's life housing cycle - consider it is permissible, reasonable, or acceptable to make housing plans on the basis of sharing, they become almost criminally inept, as well as morally incompetent. 

Here is just one of many problem stories around shared accommodation that have emerged from the pandemic. (Others include DV, predatory behaviour, refusal to take reasonable precautions or overreacting about risks - all of which literally put people's lives at risk.)

When I started renting, four decades ago and in regional Queensland, it was possible to get a reasonable and affordable flat for a single person. Nowadays, it seems that houses etc are only available for people who can, or are willing to, share. 

That's fine for the many people who do want to share, either willingly with a friend or at any price with a stranger because they cannot or will not cope with solitude, but that is NOT the case for everyone. To force a trans person who is transitioning to share in a socially regressive area is cruel, transphobic, and as harmful to health and well being as forcing people who do not want to, or who cannot, to live alone. The same applies to those who need to escape from DV or other abusive situations - and there are people I shared with in the late 80s who I never want to see again in my life. 

And to ridiculously say people should partner up in order to be able to share a place to live is to absurdly assume that love comes, or should come, on a timetable - which goes beyond lack of life experience to lack of common sense and rationality. 

Furthermore, some people also have a valid need to decompress. 

(One of my best living experiences was on a boat in a marina in the 90s: we had our own individual spaces that we could retreat to, but we also had a supportive community - something with almost a village vibe ["feel"] about it: that's what we need more of - healthy and respectful togetherness, but also apartness: as Kahlil Gibran  wrote "Let there be spaces in your togetherness".)

On top of this is the fact that some people are forced to share simply because the over-sized, over-elaborate and flimsy  (not to mention inappropriate for the climate - even before climate change) housing that we have is unaffordable for so many. 

We need to create a wider mix of housing options, and the vast majority of housing options need to match what people can afford - not what they want, if that is beyond their means. 

How do we get the housing industry to do this? Do we have to start regulating or legislating because of -what? Greed? Disdain for those who are not rich? Short-sightedness?

Next, votes and voter turnout. 

There has been a fair bit of comment about how votes cast in this year's US Presidential election have been the highest ever. That is in terms of absolute numbers, but I consider the measure that should be used is percentage of eligible voters who turned out to vote. In this year's US Presidential election, the turnout of eligible voters was around 67% (NOTE: all votes and numbers are still subject to official confirmation, and at least one recount and several legal challenges MIGHT affect this). In my opinion, that means Biden's 50.9% and #45's 47.4% are really 34.1% for Biden, and 31.8% for #45. (My sources are https://www.abc.net.au/news/us-election-2020/,  https://edition.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president, and https://graphics.france24.com/election-results-2020-live/.)

The people who don't turn out - whatever their reasons may be (cynicism, disenchantment, alienation, etc - or as a result of blocks placed in their way) - matter, as do the reasons they didn't vote. The reasons for their decision not to turn out tell the society of the USA something important. 

I've argued in the past that we need a "none of the above" vote option, partly as a means of more openly capturing that discontent in a clear and measurable way (there are many other changes I would like to see - e.g., as described here). 

Be that as it may, I was pleased to find a few sites which listed the highest voter turnouts for Presidential elections in the USA, and this one (which is consistent with all the others, but a little easier to read), indicates: 

• the highest ever turnout, at 82.6%, was in 1876 after passage of the 15^th Amendment, removing "race, color [sic], or previous condition of servitude" from eligibility to vote; 
• second, at 81.8%, was the first election of Abraham Lincoln, in 1860; and 
• third was the 1868 election of US Grant, at 80.9%.
  

The 15^th Amendment raises another important point: that the proportion of the US population who are eligible to vote has been increasing as discrimination is removed. 

From that point of view, voter turnout as a percentage of total US population (which will never be 100% because of age and other restrictions), there has been a generally increasing trend - see this diagram. 

Assuming a current US population of 331.7 million (from here, which is a continuously updated estimate), Biden's currently estimated 78.1 million votes is 23.5% and #45's currently estimated 72.7 million votes is 21.9%, giving a total of 45.4% of the total population - and there were other candidates who had a small vote as well. 

So, voter turnout as a percentage of eligible voters was not that impressive, but as a percentage of the total US population, turnout was quite possibly the highest ever. 

And yet we still have that one third who either were prevented from, or chose not to, vote . . .