February 2001
Vote. Or Else!
by Filip Palda
He's at it again. Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada's Chief Electoral Officer, wants to rob us of another liberty for our own good. This fall, Kingsley forced himself on an Alberta court to argue that citizens should be severely restricted in what they can spend to express themselves through election advertising. Now, worried by a less than 60 percent turnout rate in the last election, he wants government to take the crop to non-voters to nudge them into the polling booth, because, "Sometimes, in order to save democracy, you have to do things that might seem to run a little bit against it."
Reporters caricatured Kingsley's bizarre performance in the Alberta Court, a performance which left onlookers in no doubt that this unelected bureaucrat sees himself as a saviour of democracy. His latest pronunciamentos on forced voting add weight to the impression that Kingsley conforms to those who have been struck by what Stanford economist Thomas Sowell describes as "the vision of the anointed." These visionaries have a view of the ideal society and believe in top-down solutions. If people are not voting, then force them to vote. The anointed believe in mystical, cosmic goals, such as "the greatness of democracy" and put little weight on facts that splash mud across their rosy windscreens.
One such fact, emerging from the research of US political scientist Ruy Teixera, is that 88 percent of voter turnout decline in the US between 1960 and 1980 could be explained by voters losing allegiance to parties. These citizens started relying more on public interest groups to influence government, either during or after elections. In Canada, University of Toronto political scientist Neil Nevitte has found a similar increase in voter allegiance to these interest groups. If you take facts seriously, then the prescription to increase turnout would not be to twist our arms into the polling booth, but rather for parties to get their acts together and entice citizens by crafting appealing platforms.
Another fact to consider is the experience of Italy, Switzerland, and the US. Italy has mandatory voting and punishes non-voters by sometimes posting their names outside city hall and stamping DID NOT VOTE FOR FIVE YEARS on identification papers. Italy ranks low among western countries in political satisfaction and voters have unfavourable attitudes towards their electoral system. Switzerland and the US, meanwhile, have the lowest voter turnout rates of all western democracies, but among the highest voter satisfaction rates with their political institutions.
What these examples suggest is that turnout rates may be just incidental by-products of political systems that work well, or not. A truly competitive political system responds to the needs of its citizens without forcing them to mobilize en masse. Swiss politicians anticipate voter wishes, and perhaps this is why the Swiss feel comfortable about staying home and letting the threat of their vote discipline politicians as much as the act of voting might.
Those who obsess about voter turnout are perhaps the ones to whom we should pay the least attention. Politicians of established parties see low turnout as a rebuke. The less legitimate politicians feel, the more they try to pass laws that build around their regimes a Potemkin facade of citizen involvement.
This is why Soviet Bloc countries forced their citizens to vote. I remember one election day in Prague in the 1970s when my aunt had returned from the polling station. A young man had started shouting that the election was a farce in which he refused to participate. Police whisked him away, perhaps for a lesson in civic duties administered by truncheon. As the fall of the Soviet Bloc showed, government cannot paste a happy face on a political system and hope that people are smiling inside.
Kingsley should put away his nanny's apron and instead of proposing forced voting, put to use his considerable knowledge of world electoral systems to propose ways that would make it easier for those citizens who wish to vote to do so. Electronic voting and voting by telephone are options that can make voting hassle-free by taking advantage of new technologies. The last thing we need is a bureaucrat telling us we do harm to democracy if, like adults, we sometimes choose not to join the festivities.
Filip Palda is Professor at l'École Nationale d'Administration Publique in Montreal, and Senior Fellow of The Fraser Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
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