By way of introduction, here’s a personal anecdote. The students’ union at my university had, until Wednesday, set a quorum of 500 students for its annual (and any special) general meetings. There are well over 20,000 students here — getting one in fifty to show up doesn’t really seem like an onerous task. Still, in the past ten years, these guys achieved quorum exactly twice:
- Once when a particularly sleazy executive tried to screw over the grad students in the name of the Canadian Federation of Students (the CFS health plan was more expensive and less effective than the one we’d selected in a referendum earlier that year). The grad student body pulled together to impeach the executive, ringing up numbers like 700 for, 6 against, 20 abstaining on each motion to impeach.
- Once again — this Wednesday — when the grad students voted en masse to withdraw from the students’ union.
Why is this interesting? Grad students make up maybe one-sixth of our student body. Nonetheless, we accounted for an overwhelming majority of the people at each of those general meetings — probably in excess of 90% of the attendees. We were a loud, committed, well-organized minority, and since no-one else bothered to show up, we got our way.
This follows directly from the first principles of participatory democracy. If the “silent majority” doesn’t bother to show up, elections and referenda go to the strongest, loudest, best-organized (pardon the expression:) special-interest group.
Those of you from Alberta will no doubt cringe at that expression, but I can’t think of a better word to describe a group of people expressly united and organized around a single goal.
The dominance of small (relative to the total eligible population) and well-organized groups in low-participation polls shows up every time the Republicans debate and some network knob (most recently CNBC) pulls an online poll with, say, 75% votes in favour of Ron Paul.
Briefly: “Yeah, Ron Paul got a lot of votes, but you’re just a bunch of loud, well-organized people on the internet.” As James Ostrowski puts it on LR.c:
To put up a poll where the respondents are self-selected and then attack it because it fails to mirror the results of polls where the respondents are not self-selected is just dumb.
The respondents to CNBC’s poll, like the attendees at the two union meetings I described above, were self-selected. In both cases, the vast majority of eligible participants found other things to do.
Sort of like voters in Ontario’s recent provincial elections:
The percentage of eligible voters casting ballots in Wednesday’s Ontario election hit an all-time low despite changes introduced in an effort to boost turnout.
Only 52.6 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, or 4.4 million of 8.4 million possible voters, according to numbers released by Elections Ontario at 6:30 a.m. ET Thursday, when 99.8 per cent of polls had been counted.
The turnout was worse than a previous record low of 54.7 per cent set in 1923. It also fell below the 2003 voter turnout of 56.9 per cent.
Okay, okay, 47.4% isn’t even a majority (let alone a vast one), but it made a nice segue. When half the eligible population shows up to vote, you’re far less likely to steamroller an election with a committed minority group, particularly if your cause scares the grass-eaters (who, as one might imagine, tend to be dangerous in herds). Nonetheless, as fewer and fewer people vote, any “mandate” the winning party claims gets more and more dubious. CBC.ca reports that the Ontario Liberal party simultaneously won a “massive majority” and 42.19% of the popular vote — which is really 22.19% of eligible voters.
Hey — if their 22.19% can be a “massive majority”, then my 47.4% can damn well be a “vast majority”. We are well and truly through the looking glass now — but that’s what happens when you mix first-past-the-post democracy with modern popular journalism.
Now, here’s the blasphemous question: so what?
Many politicians consider low voter turnout to be a bad thing. The Ontario Liberals sure do — they passed legislation to increase voter turnout after the “low” (56.9%) turnout in 2003. From the above article on low voter turnout:
Legislation introduced by the previous Liberal government since the 2003 election to boost declining turnout in recent elections did not seem to have the desired effect.
(Are we at all surprised that reality once again trumped legislation? Not if we’ve been paying attention. Better luck next election, folks.)
Is low voter turnout a bad thing? In the antiseptic idealized abstract, sure — we’d surely like for each and every citizen with the franchise to study the issues, carefully weigh each candidate, and vote according to s/h/its best judgement. But here in the real world, that’s dreadfully unlikely. If my experience at crosswalks is any indication, most Canadians don’t have the judgement to cross the street unless a white glowing stick figure on the other side of the intersection tells them it’s safe to do so. (Pedwalks in my part of town are not automatic: you might have right-of-way and a “don’t walk” signal.)
If someone can’t tell when they have right-of-way to cross the fucking street, I don’t want them voting. “Look both ways” is one of the first things we teach children when they learn to walk. Adults who can’t handle that much responsibility should not be out in public unsupervised, let alone encouraged to elect national governments.
I can only see two extreme alternatives, both unpleasant: we can either encourage (at gunpoint, if necessary — all government power is ultimately backed by bullets and bayonets) legions of apathetic and ignorant people to vote, or we can put more and more power into the hands of small, focused, and well-organized minority groups. If I had to choose, I’d probably opt for the latter: if you get a broad enough section of minority groups involved, it starts to resemble Adam Smith’s idealized free market. The only problem is that this market only works every four or five years, and has the power to legislate away the profit motive (see bullets and bayonets, above).
Of course, the less power you give the government, the less of a problem this dilemma poses. (But you probably knew that — or at least saw it coming.)
