We’re not telling you not to vote. We’re just saying that these 10 people won’t be (or didn’t).
When “Poblano” began publishing his 2008 presidential election predictions and analyses on Daily Kos in 2007, people paid attention.
See the other political figures who don't vote >
Then “Poblano” moved to his own blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, where he later revealed he was really Nate Silver, the guy behind PECOTA, a system that predicts Major League Baseball players' performances.
After Silver accurately predicted the results of 49 of 50 states’ 2008 election results (and all 35 Senate races), FiveThirtyEight moved to The New York Times.
But none of the eyes on Silver this week will catch him at the polls: he has not voted since he moved to the Times and doesn’t intend to this year, though he told Charlie Rose that if he did, “it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision.”
2. Jim Lehrer
When Lehrer moderated the first presidential debate this year (you may remember it as the “Big Bird” debate), Politico dubbed him “the most trusted moderator in America.” Lehrer had moderated debates 11 times before, and according to “MacNeil/Lehrer Report” cohost Robert MacNeil, “He stays so far out of the political swamps that he doesn’t even vote.”
3, 4 and 5. Generals David Petraeus, George C. Marshall and William Tecumseh Sherman
Though he is registered as a Republican, General Petraeus stopped voting in 2002, when he became a two-star general “to avoid being pulled in one direction or another, to be in a sense used by one side or the other.” His voter abstinence follows a long military trend of non-voting generals, which includes both Marshall and Sherman. General Marshall famously disagreed with President Truman’s plan to recognize the state of Israel, saying, “If I were to vote in the election, I would vote against you.”
6. Leonard Downie Jr.
Len Downie worked in the Washington Post newsroom for 44 years, first as an intern in 1964. By 1991, he was the paper’s Executive Editor, overseeing coverage for every election from 1984 through 2008. In 2004, Downie revealed that he’d stopped voting years ago, “when I became the ultimate gatekeeper for what is published in the newspaper. I wanted to keep a completely open mind about everything we covered and not make a decision, even in my own mind or the privacy of the voting booth, about who should be president or mayor, for example.”
See the rest of the story at Business Insider