TOW #2 - For Every 10 U.S. Adults, Six Vote and Four Don’t. What Separates Them?

As the 2016 Presidential Election looms around the corner, viewers and voters come to take a look at past election turnouts in order to understand the American stigma for voting. Even though the right to vote is given to all American citizens, not everyone chooses to exercise that right. In the article, For Every 10 U.S. Adults, Six Vote and Four Don’t. What Separates Them?, journalist Alicia Parlapiano and Adam Pearce try to piece together the mystery of why some people in certain communities choose not to vote. Parlapiano is a journalist working for The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center and Pearce is a writer and illustrator for the New York Times. Parlapiano and Pearce first  separate voters into groups based on income, education, age, and race and then use rhetorical strategies such as logos, irony, and juxtaposition in order to better understand voter statistics. They establish credibility through the use of statistics and numbers in their article, such as, "African-Americans are also more reliable partisan voters — more than 90 percent voted for President Obama in 2012" (Parlapiano, Pearce 1). By employing this rhetoric device, Parlapiano and Pearce create credibility based on the facts stated. Using the facts already established, the authors use juxtaposition next to compare different groups of people based on their voter statistics, "Among voters with little education, African-Americans are 1.7 times more likely to vote than whites." (Parlapiano, Pearce 1). The purpose of juxtaposition is to contrast voter statistics to make a point and to ultimately achieve their purpose of debunking the voting myth against certain groups of Americans. Parlapiano and Pearce come to a conclusion in saying, "While young people, poor people and Hispanics are often singled out for low voting rates [...] the majority of people who didn’t vote in the 2012 presidential election were white, middle-income and middle-aged." (Parlapiano, Pearce 1). It has been previously thought that the majority of voters were middle aged and white but Parlapiano and Pearce were able to prove this assumption wrong. The authors use situational irony because statistics and research show how events turn out the opposite of what was expected or ought to happen. 

In essence, Parlapiano and Pearce achieve their goal of educating their readers on voter majorities in America in addition to successfully proving the prejudice against the youth, poor, and non-white wrong.