The people do not choose to have one option. The candidates decide to run or not!
Have you ever belonged to a club or nonprofit or something? Often they are begging people to run for office unopposed. If nobody wants to, you can't force them. People who do want to, eventually get tired or die and then it can be kind of a crisis to find a replacement.
It's similar in small local political races. If you don't vote every year, you might not have noticed?
Sometimes the incumbent goes unchallenged, and sometimes there is a challenger that is obviously not serious, but at the same time, the incumbent has a lot of murky dealings and connections that make it hard to have enthusiasm.
I only vote if there is a choice, but the "choice" is usually the incumbent in a de facto one-party government.
> Have you ever belonged to a club or nonprofit or something?
Yes, I have. Actually I'm part of the founding team of a nonprofit engaged in developing software to make parliamentarians' voting behavior transparent for their constituency.
Voter apathy is a depressing fact I'm confronted with almost every day. The sad truth is that many people ... simply don't care. The reason we founded votelog is to make people understand what their representatives are up to and make better decisions.
> If you don't vote every year, you might not have noticed?
I try to vote as often as I have the chance to and cherish everyone participating in an informed way in our democracies. Unfortunately for many people, voting is not a duty to be fulfilled but a right to be enjoyed. Just having the right is enough for them.
I guess I'm a bit jaded because I still haven't found out how to make them care to actually fulfill the duty.
I absolutely agree. To me, these are two sides of the same coin; candidates are recruited from the pool of voters and since the voters are not interested anymore, there are fewer and fewer candidates.
I struggle to understand why.
I have some idea that this because things nowadays happen so far away - as in; I hear news and happenings from the capital - but people usually don't have the means to influence these happenings, they learn to just not participate. Maybe?
