If you've somehow missed the ever-present TV ads, steady flow of newspaper analyses and final salvo of Congressional campaigning over the weekend, this is election Tuesday. Politicians across the United States will soon see --or hope to, anyway--that their efforts have convinced their constituents to vote them into office. Yet the nation's inclination to vote has been slipping steadily for the past 40 years: in the last mid-term elections, a majority of registered Americans did not vote at all. And this year, the non-partisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate expects mid-term election turnout to be one of the lowest since 1924.
"I think there is a sense of being manipulated," says Jerilyn Ross, M.A., LICSW, director of the Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders in Washington, D.C. "People really feel like 'What's the point?' You vote for someone, and the Supreme Court decides."
Carolyn Ingram, Ph.D., a psychologist based in Kentfield, California, agrees that we are a nation disillusioned. "People who don't vote have a sense of disenfranchisement and cynicism, feeling an 'us versus them' relationship with the voting process and maybe a sense of hopelessness," she says.
