The institutional rejection of undesirable voters

I’d like to follow up on a recent post with another excerpt from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future, the latest book from Michael J. Fox:

“TV talking heads proclaim every election cycle that pollster data predict apathy among college-age voters,” Fox argues. “Young voters have heard over and over again that the ‘youth vote’ will not turn out. As with wedge issues, this is yet another method employed to discourage participation in the political process by those who may disrupt the status quo – convincing them that their vote is meaningless.”

Even during the campaign for the 2008 election in the States, which brought young people out in massive numbers, people were told that they wouldn’t turn out to vote. In that case, however, the argument was based on bad data that reflected just how out of touch the pundits and pollsters can be.

“It wasn’t until late in the 2008 contest,” Fox explains, “that pundits realized polling firms calling landlines weren’t reaching young people – who for the most part used only cell phones.”

That ties in nicely with my recent post on democratic malaise. Picking up where we left off with Richard Swift’s book, The No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy, we find that he notes that Canada’s most recent election at the time, the 2000 contest, generated the lowest voter turnout in our country’s history.

And according to figures provided by Elections Canada, we’ve beaten that record since – not once, but twice.

Voter turnout is plummeting not just in North America, but in democratic countries all over the globe – and the greatest withdrawal from the democratic process is taking place among the people with arguably the greatest need for a functioning democracy.

“Everywhere it is the economically marginal,” Swift says, “those with less resources (and arguably more to gain from responsive government) who are absenting themselves from the political process… Democratic politics is becoming more a means for the relatively privileged to defend what they have, rather than a vehicle for a more equal vision of society.”

And why wouldn’t it, when whole social classes are told again and again that their vote doesn’t matter? Why wouldn’t it, when people look the results of one election after another and see more of the same?

In a very real way, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyday people assume that the government will inevitably serve the interests of the privileged, so they don’t vote. As a result, the privileged voters end up being the ones who determine the results of the election. And that ends up reinforcing the disillusionment that many people feel towards the democratic process, and so the cycle continues.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sure, there’s no easy way to convince everybody to vote, but who ever said anything worth doing was easy? If you’ve ever taken part in a voter drive, then you know how energizing it can actually be, and you’ve hopefully gotten to witness the real practical and political effects it can have. And let’s not forget that voting is just one part of the democratic process.

“It all comes down to the individual: to you,” Fox argues. “What do you want? Those who would try to convince you that your vote won’t make a difference are right only if you don’t exercise it. Don’t just weigh in on the big stuff… Show up at the local level too: mayor, city council, dog catcher. Democracy is a big muscle. Flex it and put it to work.”

Posted in Democracy