2010 Mid-Terms: Only 29% Consent to be Governed by the 112th US Congress

Nov. 4, 2010 - PRLog -- According to the Associated Press, 90 million Americans -- only 42% of registered voters -- pulled the lever for a congressional candidate on Tuesday. That's just a hair under 29% of the US population of 310.6 million.

"So much for the consent of the governed," says Thomas L. Knapp of the X2012 Project (http://x2012.us). "In a typical district, the next US Representative was chosen by, at most, one out of four or five registered voters and less than one in six of his or her alleged constituents."

"A majority of those who could have voted refused to. A supermajority either chose not to vote or weren't allowed to vote," says Knapp. "Yet for the next two years, that politician will claim to 'represent,' and to possess legitimate authority to rule, all of them."

The X2012 Project aims to put the lie to those claims. Launched as the polls closed on Tuesday evening, X2012 is a "branding campaign" which allows non-voters to dispute the conventional wisdom that their abstention is rooted in apathy or that it constitutes implicit consent to the existing system of government. By the time 2012 rolls around, the project hopes to have millions of non-voters on the record as non-consenting.

A July Rasmussen poll found that only 23% of Americans believe the US government functions with "the consent of the governed" -- the criterion of legitimacy set forth by America's founders in the Declaration of Independence.

"Thomas Jefferson didn't say 'a majority of the governed,'" says Knapp. "Even a significant minority of dissenters calls the legitimacy of a government into question. Some estimates say that fewer than one third of Americans supported the Revolution at its beginning. We've got a better case against John Boehner, Harry Reid and Barack Obama than Tom Paine had against George III."

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The mission of The Ⓧ2012 Project is to provide a popular/identifiable brand for, facilitate media coverage of, and support grassroots activism toward, a boycott of the 2012 US general election.