voter turnout

I got into kind of an argument with an old pal about the electoral college.  He was a fan of the electoral college because he feared the mob.  He thought of the electoral college as something of a barrier to keep from electing a tyrant, which seemed ludicrous, as I pointed out because it was precisely the electoral college that put Trump in power.

There are two ways the electoral college perverts the vote,  One is the way that those low population states get a bigger voice in the election because all states, regardless of population, get those extra two votes,  The other is that almost all states (I think there are two exceptions) give all their votes in a bloc so that if one state goes 60% for a candidate, but the other goes 52%, they each give all their electoral votes to the candidate.

I was thinking of the way it really doesn't matter whether you vote in a solidly red or blue state, so that the purple states gets all the campaigning.  I wondered if the vote turned out more in purple states where your counted than in red or blue.

I was hoping the google machine would give me a breakdown of voter turnout in those categories but the best I could get was this:  https://www.twincities.com/2016/11/29/minnesotas-no-1-in-voting-again/  And here you can see that the states with the highest turnout are mostly swing states.

But still all in all the turnout is low, googling to find that map, I constantly came across that among the western democracies The United States is near the bottom.  I wondered what countries have a lower turnout than the US, thinking it would be like Slovokia or Portugal, but it turns out that it is Japan, Chile, and Switzerland.  Well I don't know what to make of that.

In  the 2016 election only 60 percent of Americans voted.  Who are those 40 percent that didn't?  It seems to me that most everybody votes, but maybe they are lying to me.  Well I googled that and I got a lot of hits, maybe I will look into it this week.

I was thinking deer hunting season would begin in Michigan would be this month or the next, but looking it up I see that it doesn't start till December.  What is up with that?