While more than half a million Cuyahoga County voters cast ballots in Tuesday’s general election, residents like Latoya Butler stayed home.
“People don’t care anymore,” Butler, a 57-year-old Cleveland resident said Tuesday as she waited for a bus. “As an African-American woman, I just feel like Trump — he is like the first president that I feel like just outright in our face does not care about the minorities. He does not care. And it's like, how do you go on and vote for someone and you really don't know. You know, it's like, I don't know who to vote for.
“So I just chose to not vote.”
Many non-voters share Butler’s sentiment: Their vote, they say, doesn’t matter.
And while the United States voting base has recently turned out in historic numbers, with about two-thirds of the voting-eligible population showing up for the 2020 presidential election, millions of Americans still opt to stay home.
In Cuyahoga County, 34% of registered voters did not cast ballots in Tuesday’s election.
Why?
Maurice Worship, a 34-year-old Cleveland resident who works at Marc’s grocers, said his reason was simple: “Too lazy.”
Worship said he’s disenchanted with politics and politicians and that he feels like his vote “doesn’t matter.”
“Not much would change,” he said Tuesday, unless former President Donald Trump were elected. He said a “lot of bad stuff” happened since President Joe Biden assumed office, citing the war in Ukraine. Trump clinched a victory Wednesday morning over Vice President Kamala Harris.
While lack of trust in the system or political apathy may keep voters at home, more practical obstacles, such as work schedules, transportation issues or not having proper identification, are deterrents for some voters.
A man who said his name was Troy G was waiting for a bus late Tuesday afternoon after he got off work. He said he wouldn’t be making the trek to the polls because he just wanted to go home after a long shift.
“I didn’t get to vote today,” he said. “Just leaving it in faith. Me personally, I just look at it like, I feel like my vote don’t really matter. The world’s going to go the way it goes.”
Some typical non-voters changed their minds
But some Americans, like Jim Furr, refused to accept that.
Furr, a barista in Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood, stood behind the bar of the Gypsy Bean wearing an “I Voted” sticker for the first time in five years.
“I had to go vote for my conscience,” Furr said. “It was an important election for me to vote for my conscience and vote for women's health and vote for certain things… I have a privilege to do it.”
Furr said he doesn’t consider himself a political person: In fact, he said, he is a gay man who didn’t ever vote in favor of same-sex marriage and never thought that deeply about it until his gay friend told him he’d like to one day be married.
“Then it was just a simple light switch,” he said. “So this time, I listened to the people around me.”
What brought him to the polls this year was that Harris offered something “different,” even if he wasn’t pleased with all her policy positions. He said he would ultimately like to see the two-party system abolished, but recognizes it’s the system America currently operates under, which is what compelled him to vote.
“I've been silent, I guess, for five years because I really didn't see any important things going on,” Furr said. “But I really do believe that some people have the goodwill in mind for all of us. And then some people don’t.”
This story originally aired on WKSU/Ideastream Public Media on Nov. 6, 2024.