Four in ten of us stayed home
At the July 2024 general election, turnout was 59.9% of registered voters. That was down from 67.3% in 2019 and the lowest since 2001 (The Conversation). Count the people who aren’t registered at all and the real figure is lower still.
Local elections are starker. Turnout for council elections usually sits between 30% and 40% (Institute for Government). The bodies that run our bin collections, social care, planning and potholes are chosen by roughly one adult in three.
That is millions of people opting out of the main feedback loop our democracy has. I want to know why.
Non-voting is a signal, not a character flaw
The easy story is that non-voters are apathetic. In 25 years of building technology systems, I learned that when users stop using a feature, you don’t blame the users. You look for the friction, the broken incentive or the missing trust.
So CivicOptima will treat low turnout as a system diagnostic, read through three lenses:
Economics: Do people believe a vote changes anything that affects their lives? Do time off work, childcare and travel make voting costly?
Philosophy: Does the system offer a meaningful choice? Do people feel represented, or is abstaining itself a considered position?
Psychology: How much do trust, disillusionment and feeling ignored keep people away?
Pundits have plenty of theories. Possible culprits for 2024 include a result that looked decided in advance, falling trust, and the first general election requiring photo ID. What’s missing is the voice of non-voters themselves, in their own words.
Two questions, under a minute
This is CivicOptima’s first piece of original research, and I need your help building the data pool. The survey asks just two things:
Which UK region you live in.
Your reasons for not voting in a local or general election, picking as many as apply, or writing your own.
It doesn’t ask for your name, your email or how you vote. If you have ever skipped an election, even once, your answer counts. If you always vote, please share it with someone who doesn’t.
What happens next
I’ll publish the results here, broken down by region, along with what the data suggests about where the system is failing people. The aim isn’t another hand-wringing piece about apathy. It’s a blueprint: concrete, pragmatic fixes that target the reasons people actually give.
We don’t do doomerism. We do diagnostics. Subscribe so you don’t miss the results, and share the survey as widely as you can. The bigger the data pool, the better the blueprint.