So it turns out 2014 is the biggest year for voting in the history of the planet.
Photo: Illustration: Holly Worthington
About 3 billion of us – 40-odd per cent of the world’s population – will head to the polls this year to select our national governments, and that’s ignoring all the local-body contests (a familiar habit). It’s an especially massive year for the global South: In South Africa, it was the first time the generation born after the end of apartheid got to choose their government; while in Indonesia the first voters too young to remember the Suharto regime’s brutal 1998 crackdown will visit a ballot box in July. The number of 18-19 year-old first time voters in India roughly equalled the entire population of Australia.
Then there’s us. We don’t have the weight of national tragedy dragging us to voting booths come Saturday 20 September, but the good news is that most of us, 80 per cent or so (maybe), will show up regardless. Put another way, an esitmated several hundred thousand Kiwis will decide not to bother to vote. Overwhelmingly, these Kiwis will be young people, like me and presumably like you.
Last time around the block, over 41 per cent of us aged between 18-24 elected not to vote – or, to put it marginally less bleakly, voted not to elect. The older you are, as if by magic, the more likely you become to show up at a certain date and time and tick two boxes, until only 5 per cent of people over 65 don’t show up on election day (many of these are presumably on ventilators). To put it bluntly, that means those people with the least at stake – since they won’t be sticking around as long to enjoy or regret the consequences of their votes – have proportionally the most say in how the country is run. If we were actively trying to design the least equitable system of “democracy” (in the eye-rolling scare-quotes sense of the word) we could do a lot worse than the one we’ve ended up with.
Crappy youth turnouts have consistently plagued modern democracies, but lately they’re getting even worse. Because of privacy laws, it’s difficult to precisely outline non-voter demographics, but 2011 saw the worst turnout since 1887 – that is, since before women could legally vote. It’d be fair to admit, giving exit polling, the vast minority of young people couldn’t give two shits who ruled the country for the next three years. The simplest solution to this problem, the one reliably brayed every three years by cringingly earnest political youth groups and newspaper editors who haven’t been young since the Earth also was, is laughably banal: “Just, like, vote, you kids!” Efforts to buck this downward death-spiral have in turn become more, uh, laudable.
How the Danes do it: This video was used to help get out the youth vote in Denmark. Warning: Contains sex scenes and violence.
Is it any wonder we drag our feet on voting day? We’re a generation who’ve grown up hearing phrases like ‘buying votes’ and ‘electoral bribes’, who suspect that behind every well-received policy is half a year of focus groups, that every off-the-cuff sound-bite is as rigorously planned and nutritionally void as a whey protein diet – all light and sound and tough-on-whatever, but very little substance. We’re a generation who’ve grown up on that and become democratically stunted, so cynical we even vote ironically because hey, what’s the difference?
Living in an era of political marketing, our votes have become commoditised like those not-very-useful supermarket reward cards – the ones that can only be redeemed every three years to buy a tub of ice cream that we’re not even sure we want. It seems obvious that Russell Brand’s malcontent ramblings should gain so much traction in young people who, today, have trouble distinguishing between the many varieties of old white dudes.
Let’s add the other factors that make democracy an old person’s game. We have neither the capital nor the connections of those who’ve been circling the sun for 50 years, carrying around with them a lifetime of dealing with pointless bureaucracy and know how best to circumvent it – in many cases they've helped set up this very system.
Gen Y is less invested in maintaining the status quo, often literally; there’s nothing like a diverse portfolio to make you vote for whoever promises not to reform the financial system. Vote, and also maybe give a little bit of money too.
Some facts: recent migrants are less likely to vote than long-term migrants, who are less likely to vote than natives. Poor people are far less likely to vote than rich.
If you feel you’ve got nothing at stake, no force in this universe or the next will compel you to learn the tedious intricacies of MMP
It’s very hard to imagine what you’ve got to lose when you’re cooking mince for the fourth time this week in the run-down kitchen of a run-down state house in a run-down suburb an hours bus ride from your minimum wage job. If you plot “poor” and “young” on a Venn diagram, you’ll find they often intersect exactly like you’d expect. If you feel you’ve got nothing at stake, no force in this universe or the next will compel you to learn the tedious intricacies of MMP.
But let’s not get too cute – our contemporaries in other parts of the world face these hurdles and worse, but still religiously exercise their fundamental democratic right. In 2007, the Electoral Commission paid for a study exploring reasons for non-voting among young low-to-medium earners. They discovered non-voters can be divided into one of five camps: Confident and Convinced, Tentative Triers, Distrustful and Disillusioned, Living for the Weekend and Politically Absent. They don’t need much explanation.
Organisations love studies like these, because they seem to break down complex phenomena like non-voting into solvable little chunks. “Weekenders? Make voting cool! Absent? Be literally everywhere, all the time! Disillusioned? Ram the dogma of ‘every vote counts’ down their throats till they spew amorphous orange men!”
There’s no doubt these campaigns are capital-letter Good Things. It’s hard to argue with any drive to give voice to the voiceless, or encourage interest in the government that’s supposed to represent us all. Saying that, though, we’re looking at a situation where the very people who have the most to lose by not voting don’t vote. Isn’t that a bit too neat? Surely it points to some deeper, more systemic problem than simple ignorance or laziness.
We don’t need to break out the tinfoil just yet, but we might have a think about what that deep insistence on voting really implies: on one, single day out of just over 1000, you’re allowed to weigh in on what direction the nation takes – don’t waste it! Is the democracy we always talk about as hallowed and precious and foundational really such a meagre, spindly thing?
Look, I’m not advocating some system of perma-referendum on every little issue. Such a system works well enough for Switzerland, but there’s something to be said for the contemplative capacity of allowing representatives freer reign (like, the Swiss didn’t give women the vote until 1971). Besides, that’s nit-picking. Would voting every three months rather than three years really help young people find their political mojo? I doubt it.
A quote attributed to Churchill goes “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” That’s true, but – grimly misogynist referenda excepted – we’ve hardly bothered looking at the other flavours democracy comes in; there’s more than just 'neapolitan' on the supermarket shelf, even if our shabby rewards card won’t stretch that far. This is truer today than it’s ever been, with the so-called democratising power of the internet. Usually the ‘democratising’ potential is used as a metaphor, to suggest the ability of even the least powerful members of society to put out their opinions, but what if we allowed it to actually mean something?
Should we ignore the medium’s radical potential because it’s young, nearly as young as the hundreds of thousands of non-voting young citizens who use it daily?
What if we built mechanisms into our democracy to allow people to speak collaboratively on issues they cared strongly about – to become expert on them, and then to contribute something more substantive than an ambiguous ticked box every thousand days, or a select committee submission that might lead nowhere?
It’s difficult to imagine what this would look like, but only because it’s never been done. Collaborative decision making software like the home-grown Loomio might offer a way forward, or maybe the right tool hasn’t yet been developed yet. Maybe you’ll invent it.
Again, I’m not advocating an overwhelmingly awful option like disbanding parliament in favour of Facebook groups (though the idea of constructing the budget in a Google Docs spreadsheet with three million of my closest friends does appeal). It just seems perverse we should accelerate our markets to light speed without extending that same courtesy to our infinitely more important political system.
Some progress is being made, sure; local body elections might be held online in 2016. It just sure would be nice if this same principle were applied to elections that weren’t customarily ignored as irrelevant, and the internet wasn’t treated as an either/or question against the current postal vote method. Complaints around cost miss the point; it is literally impossible to price the cost to democracy that 60 per cent of an electorate not bothering to vote incurs.
I’m not suggesting the internet is some magical salve we can use to daub away non-participation entirely; I’m simply saying that for better or worse, kids live online and people care online. They do give two shits.
They rage impotently, take up pet causes, communicate meaningfully and sometimes elegantly with one another. Could there be any more beautiful vision of a switched-on polity? Should we ignore the internet's radical potential because it’s young, nearly as young as the hundreds of thousands of non-voting young citizens who use it daily? Or should we pretend it doesn’t exist, in the same way we still force another notoriously under-represented group – overseas Kiwis (about a sixth of the voting pool) to fax in their votes?
There are a couple of other things we probably shouldn’t do.
God forbid we lower the voting age by a couple of years, to give young people an earlier sense that their opinions might in some way be important to the determination of their shared futures. We all know that the juvenile brain is physically incapable of producing rationality prior to its eighteenth birthday, which is why we never hold them accountable for any important action with potentially devastating consequences.
Nor should we take a few precious hours out of maths or english each week to teach senior classes that occasionally expressing their opinion is essential to making society function. The State has no place in schools, and that goes double for low-decile state schools.
It’s one thing to demand the Electoral Commission enrol as many people to vote as are eligible, but it’s quite another to tie its hands behind its back and simultaneously waterboard it.
This is the biggest year for democracy, ever, but it’s not as big as it could be if we were allowed to vote online, or if our opinions were captured in a more direct, intuitive way: a way that supplemented the existing system, in the same sense that expanding the franchise back in 1893 supplemented the legitimacy of our nation.
In the age of frictionless sharing, should we expect anything less than a demand for frictionless caring? If young people aren’t voting en masse – and they’re not – maybe that isn’t a feature of our democracy.
Maybe it’s a bug.
Cover illustration by Holly Worthington.
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