The voting fetish

As the next presidential election draws closer and closer, those who are passionate about voting will almost certainly intensify their efforts to promote the act of voting and increase voter turnout in general. As with any election year, I suppose, it will not be uncommon to hear advertisements for all variants of the vote—early, on-campus, absentee or otherwise—and especially to witness an aggressive campaign against voter abstinence. Such abstinence will itself be elevated as an issue of central importance, and is likely to be surrounded with solutions involving everything from education to identification, fiduciary incentives to mandated participation, even registration to legislation.

These efforts, however, rest on a faulty premise. They rest on the premise that those who do not vote necessarily do so out of either apathy or ignorance, and, furthermore, that these citizens can be induced to vote if only they can be made aware of the issues at stake. Aside from the inherent arrogance of this position, though, its proponents also fail entirely to take into account any of the other possible motivations a citizen might hold for abstaining from the vote.

In their rush to celebrate the vote, for example, cheerleaders of American bipartisan democratic elections fail to consider that some non-voters might in fact also recognize the act of voting as a civic duty, and one that facilitates a crucial interaction between citizen and state. It could be the case, then, that some non-voters willfully spurn this duty as a means of communicating a highly aware and politically informed message of protest. It would thus be a mark of the most profound ignorance to hastily, universally and unquestioningly mischaracterize as a failure to vote an act that might explicitly have been intended as a refusal to do the same.

In a related scenario, a citizen might also refuse to vote based on a moral objection to any given element of the election itself. A citizen may feel, for example, that the scope of the election—which this year will impose consequences on all aspects of American life—is unjustified in some way. A citizen may hesitate at the idea of invoking state power as a method by which to bend the behavior of the population to her own preferences. She may recognize that, despite the negligible weight her vote will hold against her fellow citizens, the sum weight of theirs will bear down on her a considerable burden. She may be of a political persuasion that eschews coercive measures of conflict resolution for those that rely only on the voluntary individual express consent of all involved parties. She may be unwilling to cast a vote which, though it would be of no particular significance to the outcome of the election, would in her own mind represent the concession of her consent to a political apparatus that she would rather oppose, if only on an individual and philosophical basis. She may simply feel that the political considerations of the country represent a burden in which she—having no substantial or identifiable part in their making—would prefer not to share, and she may choose instead to frame her approach to living in society around her own individual efforts, and not the other way around.

The last of these is, perhaps, the most in need of defense. (Most voters will admit, if reluctantly at first, that the refusal to vote can serve as a heady weapon of protest and discontent; they will be more hard pressed to concede, however, that no individual should be forcibly burdened with the dubious political dichotomy that constantly endeavors to wedge its way into her life). The fact that a citizen has the right to vote, however, logically implies that she also has a right not to vote, thereby affirming on the basis of natural rights a philosophically legitimate position of non-voting on the part of the individual. It also comes down, simply, to the fact that she should have a prerogative to prioritize her own personal needs and interests above the fool’s errand of trying to delineate the meager difference between two men like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

As if this were not enough, it also has to be noted that not all votes tallied in a given year should be counted as blanket victories for the American democracy qua democracy. I suspect that many voters exercise their right to vote not out of a sense of duty, but rather out of a sense of defensive necessity driven by the impulse to ward off societal predations on their property. In fact, as the American lawyer and political philosopher Lysander Spooner noted in the years after the Civil War, an election itself is something like a battle: Just because a man who is dropped between two warring factions will take up arms in order to defend himself, it cannot rationally be said that the battle is one of his choosing. In other words, voting as an act of self-defense itself should not be misinterpreted as consenting to or approving of any given democratic system.

Whether or not these voting behaviors are rational—i.e., whether they can be expected to achieve their desired outcomes—is a separate issue. It should be plain, however, that not all non-voters simply need (or want) to be persuaded to vote, and that not all of those who vote do so out of a democratic impulse toward civic engagement. In the end, the “voter apathy” bogey is, at its best, a convenient but intellectually bankrupt position to entertain—and that is to say nothing of the jubilant advertisement of it that is sure only to intensify in the coming weeks.

Chris Bassil, Trinity ’12, is currently working for Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Mass. His column runs every Wednesday. You can follow Chris on Twitter @HamsterdamEcon.