Stop Making Democracy Worse
Twas a cool autumn night, and I lay tossing and turning. I had just finished reading The Myth of the Rational Voter, and a horrible nightmare had struck. A political nightmare, a vision of a system of democratic governance that by gunpoint forces low information voters to cast a ballot, dilutes the representation of strong interests and removes the people's veto of governmental legitimacy. Waking in a cold sweat, I was relieved; indeed, surely no such abominable political system could exist in reality…
Then I remembered I live in Australia.
Overdramatised purple prose aside and with an election eminently approaching, I recently, like all unfortunate Australian citizens, have been the continual subject of harassment. My vote has been bartered with, pleaded with and grossly begged for by Liberals, Greens, a variety of socialist parties, whatever the hell Clive Palmer’s platform is and Labor. I’ve spent hours talking to their representative foot soldiers, been assailed by their enormous efforts in canvassing and advertisement, all great endeavours, all greatly in vain. And to some extent, I feel a pang of guilt when I think of these somewhat tragic figures, the lukewarm radical Trotskyite, the evangelical small L Liberal, the somewhat crazed green-haired environmentalist, the anti-vaxxer who believed the all-powerful deep state could be voted out, even the labor voter who hung his red flag once every three years, I unabashedly wasted these people's time and dashed their hopes across the rocks. My vote is going to none of them, not even as a fourth or fifth preference.
My ballot will be spoilt this election.
And you, dear reader, should spoil your ballot too.
Cards on the table, this is a polemic, a work of anti-praxis. Compulsory voting is terrible, and most people reading this article (young students) will make horrible voters. So let this article serve as a reminder and a call to action; it is legal to invalidate your vote, and for most of you, it’s practically morally obligatory.
Yet, despite being a rarity amongst developed liberal democracies, it is a sacred cow of the Australian public. Most native Aussies that I have spoken to on the issue have reacted to my objection as if I had suddenly put on a pair of jackboots, shouted death to democracy and endorsed the type of authoritarianism you might find in North Korea. I’m even worse than whatever the opposite political enemy is supposed to be; at least they abide by this arbitrary but supreme norm. It’s incredible that despite the vast gulf of typical political disagreement, the Australian public is so singularly united on such a terrible ideal. Roughly based on polling data, about 60% to 70% of people, a plurality of the population reading this article, are already objecting[1]. But please, dear reader, at least allow me to lay out my case.
Throughout this article, I shall endeavour to persuade you of two conclusions. Firstly, the grounds compulsory voting stands on both moral and political utility grounds are flimsy, and secondly that you, my dear reader, should personally not vote in this election. In addition, I hope this article will serve as a reasonably comprehensive rebuttal to most of the justifications I have heard in and around our wonderful Bundoora campus. My hope, dear reader, is that by the conclusion of this page, you will concur that to ensure our societal health, our voting behaviour should abide by the physician's maxim, Primum non nocere; first, do no harm.
So before examining why you should invalidate your vote this election, let's pay the devil his due and layout the two most substantial lines of reasoning for why it is ethically acceptable to coerce people to vote.
Low voter turnout is intrinsically negative.
A relatively common refrain is to ground the argument for compulsory voting in concerns about inequality, typically by laying out the following premises.
Low turnout is unequal turnout.
This unequal turnout is based upon socioeconomic factors, and poor voter turnout consequently reinforces their disadvantage.
Whilst there are a number of solutions to rectify this, the best and most expedient is compulsory voting.
Voting compulsion does not infringe upon one’s liberty.
Ergo everyone should be compelled to vote.
If successful, this line of reasoning seems reasonably conclusive; a government voted in by a significant minority of the population would possess less legitimacy, be loaded towards certain interests and yet this will prove upon further examination to be against democratic principles.
There are a few matters to pick apart here. Whilst it is no breaking news that overall voting participation has been precipitously dropping in the democratic world since post World War 2[2]. The number one predictor across almost all developed democracies for willingness to vote is age rather than economic or social status. This seemingly reflects a lack of strong youth interest in direct electoral matters rather than systemic disadvantage, which makes sense considering the lack of assets, investment etc. that young demographics lack compared to older cohorts. A case still might be raised that the interests of the young being discounted are a significant blow to democratic legitimacy, but the case seems significantly weaker than if the primary factor driving willingness to vote was something like social status. Let us then consider democratic legitimacy in further depth.
The effects low voter turnout has on the question of legitimacy seems more complicated than at first glance. In principle, non-voting can reflect contentment with all available political choices and an assurance that whoever it is who wins the election will be supported. The decline of voter turnout in developed democracies then might actually be a sign of health, rather than of decline, as political governance across the board has refined itself to be at least tolerable to the non-voter block. This is more plausible than one might think, as it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the decline in voter turnout has had an inversed relationship with overall civic participation[3].
But even granting this is a sign of despondency rather than contentment when people refuse to vote out of a lack of enthusiasm for any candidate, this too can still produce a legitimate government, just as a government that possesses incompetent ministers or produces reprehensible policy might still be a sovereign representative of its constituency.
Democratic government requires an affirmation of the legitimacy of rulership we ourselves would not personally elect, do not like or otherwise believe are immoral when we are on the losing side of the electoral process. Consequently, turnout is a poor measurement of legitimacy and by no means a necessary feature of an ethical, democratic system.
Premise 4 can also be undermined quite extensively and is a nice segway to address those among you who argue that the state’s coercion on this matter is minor and that whining about fines is childish. The severity and lengths the Australian government has persistently shown in both prosecuting offenders and trampling over other enshrined rights to compel mandatory voting is shocking. The Australian electoral system has (successfully) fought freedom of information after freedom of information case to protect a clandestine full list of legal exemptions from within their purview. Whilst the right of conscience belonging to of non-religious moral backgrounds is ignored outright[4].
This precedent was established in Judd v McKeon (1926) and has been repeatedly affirmed in, Krosch v Springell and Horn v Australian Electoral Commission. De facto discrimination on the basis of religious belief is enshrined in what constitutes a valid reason to be exempt from voting, the entire process is designed to keep information away from voters rather than ensuring they can understand if they qualify for an exemption on any number of valid grounds.
The value of political participation in the first place on any truly democratic view of politics is the voluntary expression of the free choice to actualise beliefs, interests and efforts. Any electoral system that invalidates the ability to express one’s interests, as Australian compulsory voting does, cannot be said to live up to this ethic.
The right and the ability to abstain from voting is no less important than the right of anonymous participation, it enables the weak or timid, unpopular or hated, to protest in a manner that is safe, requires little coordination, few resources and as has been proven repeatedly in several international elections were low turnout was a major decider in the outcome, politically decisive. Removing this ability from the populace doesn’t reduce political inequality; it exacerbates it.
Non-voters are free-riding
This is undoubtedly the most sophisticated out of all the defences I have heard, but ultimately, I find it as unpersuasive as the rest. To let the argument carry water, let us grant that our competitive democratic electoral process is a public good much like drinking water or effective law enforcement. There seems to be little conceptual problems in granting that people have duties in regards to voting as well as rights. However, the inverse would additionally appear to be true. If the moral considerations which justify democratic voting rights imply that prudential, as well as moral considerations, imply duties, they might equally suggest obligations to exercise conscience and avoid malfeasance in regards to voting as a public good.
A priori there’s little reason to posit that one set of duties towards our democratic public good is intrinsically more ethical or democratic than any other possible set, be it a commitment to a more demanding ethical system that prescribes political quietism, concern over the uncertainty of the consequences of voting etc. Thus, when these duties conflict it seems reasonable for people to abstain for both prudential and moral reasons. Nor does the benefit of the fruits of the electoral process seem to be without compensation; non-voters not only provide tax but can compensate their respective communities in a variety of ways.
In addition, free riding implies a degree of harm to the community, using and utilising resources without providing adequate compensation. But who, I ask, is the recipient of this harm of abstention from the electoral process? It is not as if a personal choice to decline from voting otherwise prevents or impedes the actions of others. If one posits that inattentiveness to social issues is an act of harm towards those who lack the ability to vote in the first place (children, the severely disabled etc) so to do this harm seem equally causable by poor voting. Between careless, ignorant and prejudiced voting or abstention, the choice should be clear.
With the most robust ethical cases cast aside, one might still object and raise some instrumental reasons to justify why everybody should cast a vote. But, then again, political calculations or even mere practicality might still compel us all to vote. Yet with further consideration, these arguments prove insufficient too.
Not voting is irrational.
Reasonable people can possess the same qualms about voting as they do about committing to marriage, joining a civic group, having children or participating in any number of institutions belonging to our society. The confusion, I believe, emerges from a conflation between ignorance and irrationality. Ignorance itself can be rational and when Federal politics in a consensus democracy like Australia is minimally intrusive upon the average person's life, the cost of educating oneself on an issue begins to exceed the benefit that such knowledge would provide. So why then would a rational agent expend itself engaging in this fruitless activity rather than abstain?
We ourselves make these rational ignorance trade-offs all the time; the very fact that you as a university student have presumably chosen a major that specialises in a given subject rather than some mythical wide-ranging course that comprehensively explains every piece of human knowledge available is evidence enough of this. The renowned Shakespearean scholar is not irrational because they lack an understanding of the intricacies of quantum mechanics, the theoretical physicist is not irrational because they lack an understanding of the complexities of the social lives of mediaeval anchorites, and the average layperson is not irrational because they lack an understanding of the intricacies of politics.
Unfortunately, in our country, we actively punish those with the wisdom to know the extent of their knowledge, such as in the surreal case of O’Brien v Warden (1981), Wherein Mr Warden having recently arrived in Canberra a week before the Territory election for the ACT House of Assembly and thus consequently knowing nothing about any of the candidates chose to abstain and was ultimately ruled to have an insufficient legal excuse. Amusingly for proponents of a coerced vote being rational, our own legal experts disagree. As Chief Justice Blackburn commented on O’Brien v Warden “… In my opinion the Act does not oblige the elector to make a true expression of his preference among the candidates… he need not express himself intelligibly or at all.”
So, like we do when we speak on matters outside our expertise, we should exercise a degree of humility. Experts in Neogothic revival architecture are rarely called to comment upon the merits of novel theories of abiogenesis; it would be absurd to do so, and it is equally as absurd to expect the average layperson who has already acknowledged their ignorance to make an informed vote. Yet, you are calling upon them to be an expert upon not just one such subject outside their normal purview but of many; you ask of Joe Bloke not merely to discriminate between experts and grifters on topics as wide-ranging as public transportation, economics, environmental policy, foreign relations, national security amongst countless other issues, but entrust in him the power to actualise his poorly formed political intuitions, by allowing him and others of his ilk to vote in whoever inherits our esteemed Australian government.
A non-voter is not uniformly a passive, ignorant agent, nor as established above, are they some vicious parasite feasting upon the public good. On the contrary, they, like all people, are making decisions to achieve valued ends and for the majority of the population, politics, rationally speaking, is simply not worth the effort.
It encourages civic participation and education!
Seemingly empirically false, though this is a common self-aggrandising myth that seems to pop up repeatedly. Australians are not more politically educated (and in certain instances are less so) than citizens of comparable countries throughout the anglosphere (e.g. New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom)[5] all countries that can give us as close to as possible in sociology an explicit independent variable do not find that compulsory voting provides any significant civic benefit over and above voluntary voting, which is all the more reason fewer people should vote in this country. These comparative systems avoid a large subset of ignorant voters just by making the process a virtue rather than forcibly diluting the quality of an electoral process by dragging the civically challenged into it.
But won’t the abolition of mandatory voting systemically favour one major party over another?
I find those with already firm political attachments often raise this objection, often but not always by members of a particular party associated with the youth vote and a pale pinkish flag; it’s a patently droll attempt at realpolitik and shame on you, dear reader if you find this an acceptable defence. Let us employ some unbiased reflection, and the faults of this stance should become apparent. Granting that this is true, so too would the inverse. And if we are to take a neutral position to examine the structure of democracy, either system, mandatory or non-mandatory, favours particular party politics over others. Prima facie, there is no ground onto which we should believe that a party favoured by mandatory voting would be a better political ruler than a party favoured by voluntary voting.
In addition, having dispensed with the arguments above for wide-ranging voting participation being a requisite for legitimacy, this objection can be safely dismissed.
Not voting: The rational choice.
Honestly, how many amongst you who plan to vote in this election can comprehensively explain not merely the policy package of your chosen parties but the historical implementations of said policies and perform the cross-comparisons necessary with other similar applications to declare it worthwhile. It is shocking to me how many people have memorised a pointless screed of talking points without even for a moment considering the next level of analysis, the interconnections and consequences said political changes might have with already existing institutions, opportunity cost and every other metric by which we judge the value of a government’s promised actions. People will believe absolutely in a bundle of policies they themselves cannot explain and that my dearest reader is irrational. When presented with the scenario abstention is the sensible choice.
This is psychologically untenable; I feel like I must vote to be politically active.
Yet despite all these reasons contra voting, many among you will reflect onto me some psychological reason why you must vote. So whilst I won’t claim to be some expert in psychoanalysis, I’ll briefly address them here.
Go physically protest, act out your beliefs in your personal life, touch grass for Christ's sake. There is a myriad of politically active actions you can take that don’t involve casting a ballot! Any level of civic participation will be considerably more personally impactful and incite less negative consequences than your malfeasant vote. It’s self-indulgent bloviating to be so fixated on casting a ballot as the be-all and end-all of politics. You either want to actually enact political change or merely to feel as if you are the sort of person who might achieve political praxis; if voting is the extent of your political willingness to act, you, dear reader, undoubtedly are the latter. You’re forced at gunpoint in this country to vote; it’s not some triumphant grand gesture. So please, stop larping as politically concerned unless you are willing to put in the actual legwork. Voting poorly is simultaneously the seemingly least consequential and most damaging act you could take; for the sake of the country, do anything else! And spare the rest of us the damage you might do in pursuing what is ultimately an illusionary fantasy of political activism.
I’m going to vote anyway.
Then donkey your vote.
Wait, seriously?
No, seriously, your interests are much more likely to be better represented by random chance than they are by your conscious deliberation. I’d much rather you deface your ballot entirely, but if needs must, you should entrust your interests to lady luck. When even experts tested in their respective fields struggle to achieve accuracy above a coin flip on basic, non-controversial facts[6], you stand no chance of enacting a better outcome.
The advantages of donkeying your vote are twofold. Firstly, the removal of political bias; chance does not discriminate on the basis of soundbites you heard on TikTok. Secondly, if democracy is to be understood as an egalitarian ethos, what better way to rid yourself of culpability in personal prejudice than by voting blind?
In summation
If you are lukewarm, don’t vote in this election.
If you are a political partisan, you especially shouldn’t vote in this election.
If you, for whatever reason, want to vote anyway, considering all of the above, donkey your vote. Fortuna better represents your interests than yourself.
All it takes to spoil your ballot is a simple act, fill it in improperly, deface it, draw a frowny face, even two lines forming an X over the page will suffice. Just ensure that your preferential ranking is illegible and your ballot will be thrown out.
For the sake of our democracy, throw out your vote.
[1] Bennett, Scott (31 October 2005). "Compulsory voting in Australian national elections" (PDF). Research Brief. No. 6. Department of Parliamentary Services. p. 22.
[2] Explaining Political Disenchantment, Finding Pathways to Democratic Renewal’, The Political Quarterly, 77. 2. (2006) pp. 184-194
[3] Arend Lijphart’s ‘Unequal Participation; Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma’ P. 6
[4] Lisa Hill, ‘Compulsory Voting in Australia: History, Public Acceptance and Justifiability’
[5] Compulsory Turnout: A Solution to Disengagement?’ in Democracy and Voting, (The Hansard Society’s Democracy Series, 2006), pp.5-22
[6] Rosling, H., Rönnlund, A., & Rosling, O. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books.