Democracy, meet COVID-19
Everywhere you look, it seems, someone is trying to keep someone else from doing something: Don’t carry a gun. Don’t get an abortion. Don’t drive so fast. Don’t inhale that whipped cream. Don’t get a vaccine. Don’t put that in your mouth.
One of the biggies these days is voting rights. Some people are trying to prevent other people from voting. But why? Well, turns out that turnout can be bad for your health … at least during a worldwide pandemic event.
mohamed mahmoud hassan
The evidence for that claim comes from researchers who examined the Italian national constitutional referendum conducted in September 2020 along with elections for assembly representatives in 7 of the country’s 20 regions and for mayors in about 12% of municipalities. The combination mattered: Voter turnout was higher in the municipalities that voted for both the referendum and local elections (69%), compared with municipalities voting only for the referendum (47%), the investigators reported in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Also occurring in September of 2020 was, as we mentioned, a worldwide pandemic event. You may have heard about it.
The investigators considered the differences in election turnout between the various municipalities and compared them with new weekly COVID-19 infections at the municipality level. “Our model shows that something as fundamental as casting a vote can come at a cost,” investigator Giuseppe Moscelli, PhD, of the University of Surrey (England) said in a written statement.
What was the cost? Each 1% increase in turnout, they found, amounted to an average 1.1% increase in COVID infections after the elections.
See? More people voting means more COVID, which is bad. Which brings us to today’s lesson in people preventing other people from doing something. Don’t let COVID win. Stay in your house and never come out. And get that smeckledorf out of your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been.