There is nothing that annoys politicians more than people who just don’t get around to voting. For months, the parties are knocking doors and getting pledges. In a tight fight, every vote will be counted on, and a well-resourced team will manage to knock on doors a half-dozen times until the name is ticked off the Reading Pads [remember them?].
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By 10pm on election day, politicians and their agents are often fuming at the bastards who had promised to turn out but arrived home a few minutes before the polls closed saying they can’t be bovvered to go out again. If MPs could enact one snap piece of legislation the day after a general election, it would undoubtedly be compulsory voting.
Listening to James Crabtree on last Monday’s Start the Week (Radio 4 – 35 mins in) I’m reminded of the speculation about how the election is really decided by a tiny number of votes in a tiny number of seats that are almost exclusively targeted by the parties. As James puts it …
“they ignore almost everyone in the country and spend a gigantic amount of time trying to find that small number of people who might change their minds…”
Now this can only surely be a bad thing? A phenomenon that cries out for a change in our electoral system? I’m inclined to agree, but I’ve got one major doubt:
Leaving aside the impact that this narrowcasting has on our national conversation, should we be worried by the fact that the most undecided, irresolute, shilly-shallying ideologically footloose, unprincipled, impulsive flibbertigibbets get to decide who our government is?
Surely those who spend hours discussing, arguing, campaigning, knocking on doors, and – dammit – BLOGGING – should be the ones who get a more weighted vote? We’re the ones who care! We’re the ones that might have an idea which way up the country should be?
Why are the Electoral Commission even bothering about the nudniks who can’t navigate their way onto the electoral roll in the first place? Why are they forever wondering aloud about how they can extend voting to Saturdays, get us to Tweet or txt our choice of govt in, or vote on … like … uh.. Facebook, or something? Or somehow get Ms Dynamitee-he to organise a rave in the polling booth to attract yoof?
Surely the election shouldn’t be decided by people who only turn out if there isn’t anything worth watching on the telly? Or the ones who change their mind as their pencil hovers over the ballot paper? And don’t get me started on whether people who would be better off being removed from the gene pool entirely should have a vote equal to that of a brain surgeon.
We’re not talking about sullen stay-aways here, by the way. These aren’t principled abstainers – angry ‘none-of-the-above’ voters. These are the ones who forgot it was on Fursday. The ones who don’t read the papers that have obsessed about elections for the last … eternity. The ones who’ve spent tuning out any discussion of their future during the all encompassing campaign or looking at politicians hair instead of weighing their arguments.
In every other area of our lives, we use trade-offs. We stay out of the shops that don’t sell things we’re interested in, hoarding our cash to spend in the places we care about. Shouldn’t people be offered the option to trade their vote in elections for something they care about – a heavily weighted vote in The X Factor or a lowering of their car-taxes or something like that? Why not incentivise people not to vote with small-ish bribes? Shouldn’t voting be something you positively want to do?
I’ve posted here before about how the lust for certainty could be a sin. How important diversity is in the context of the wisdom of crowds argument. I’ve argued about how light preferences and the need to make trade-offs is the magic ingredient that makes representative government work and how active citizens can be a menace to a good democracy. I’d urge you to read this funny post about how obnoxious people with the halo effect are.
“Cyclists, not content with having lanes painted everywhere to accommodate their perversion, routinely feel free to jump lights or board the pavement whenever tedious interventions like the Highway Code interfere with their path of righteousness. My own view is that the lycra-wearing freaks should either pay road tax or face being hosed off the streets.”
So, for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think that the indecisive should be discouraged from voting – quite the opposite. I’d almost argue that their votes deserve some sort of weighting for them to count more heavily than people who read broadsheets and shout at the telly.
However, it does cut across a general metropolitan liberal prejudice that I hold: Like Brendan O’Neill, I think that politics should be a clash of ideas – a forum where big ishoos are thrashed out and decisions are not based on an appeal to the touchy-feely dumbed-down focus-grouped puddle of public sentiment. It is the ‘don’t knows’, after all, that this kind of politics is designed to appeal.
The belief that they should be banned from the ballots is implicit in a lot of the arguments that I hear favouring alternative versions of democracy where people choose policies rather than the quality of representation. I’d love to hear some lively loudmouth make the argument with a bit of passion so that it could be challenged.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
While I understand your point of view, and certainly the desire to have those who make the effort be the ones who make the kings is strong in me, I’m more of the opinion that we should be incentivising people to vote, rather than taking the opposite stance.
(As an aside I have a habit of inflicting exactly what you propose on various friends, “If you didn’t make the effort to go to the polling station, don’t try to lecture me on politics”. But that’s a personal failing.)
Most people take the path of least resistance. Give them the choice of getting something in return for not voting, especially where that thing is a lot easier than marking a ballot paper, and they’ll likely go for it. What needs to be done is to make them realise how important their vote is. The most extreme way is to place them in a dictatorship for a while. Once they’ve had that experience they’ll want to get out on a dark and rainy evening to put forward their opinion.
As you point out the dumbing down of policies is never a good thing; just look at what BBC Question Time has become and where televised debates are taking us. Still, as any advertising executive will tell you, there’s a difference between selling to the lowest common denominator and approaching a topic in a way that gets people to buy into it. The media achieves this with attention grabbing headlines such as, ‘every park is full of dogs that are trained to kill you as soon as scratch their own ear’ but fails to offer a balanced point of view. How about an independent source of information that can make people sit up and listen without spinning things one way or another? Make people want to vote and make that voting easy, rather than give them an excuse to avoid their obligation. It may feel like dog whistling, or genetically targeted drugs, but when life is this comfortable people need to be stirred up.
Leigh,
I think you’ve responded to my provocations on Twitter rather than the actual post. I’m arguing that ‘light preferences’ are *more important* than heavy ones. It’s just that – when we argue that people should be encouraged to get involved in making decisions in individual issues, the net effect is that you objectively become an advocate of the postition that I’ve headed the post up with.
Yes, accidently I have.
Apologies.
I read the first couple of paragraphs and presumed this post was an expansion of the conversation on Twitter. For those passing through, we were talking about ‘… if voting should be made harder to do in order to improve democracy.’
Feel free to move it to the new post if you want.
Gauntlet thrown, gauntlet picked up. For the avoidance of doubt, these are not necessarily my opinions. I may, or may not, be playing Devil’s Advocate.
-An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Like you, Paul, I have spent Thursday evenings desperately trying to get every last person down to the polling station. I am fairly sure why some people have cast their ballots in a particular way; because they received a knock on the door at half past eight on polling day from someone wearing a coloured rosette who spoke to them for five minutes and said something to the effect of even if you don’t like one particular party, it’s important to vote because of all the sacrifices made for democracy all the people and so on, and they vote for the colour of the rosette.
If we had lots of people who weren’t aligned to a particular party, but made a sober consideration of the issues, the policies and the candidates, and made their vote on that basis, Paul might have a point. What we actually have are people who are swayed by base emotion; because the leader of a party made a gaffe, or they only care about the Grangemouth Swamp Rats, or because they saw a poster.
What is the result? Half-baked policies shouted from the front pages of the tabloids that are quietly forgotten two weeks later, just to give the appearance of politics and policy. Unless they spend an amount of time reading newspapers and sitting in party meetings that for any other activity would be considered a sign of mental illness, voters cannot make a decision on the big issues because there is no easily accessible, calm, sober information or opinion on which to make a decision.
What is the cause? The self-same half baked policies, the incestuous relationship between politics & media and the revolving door between media and lobbying. It’s hard to get people to vote, and you don’t have time, resources or people enough to have a serious conversation with the electorate.
We then have three types of voter; those who will definitely turn out (most of whom will definitely turn out for their coloured rosette of choice), those who definitely will not turn out and those who might turn out, given a prod. How are they prodded? By screaming, stupid headlines. That puts people off, but you cannot pull out of the arms race because you will not get as many votes as the other side.
All the talk of encouraging people to vote is all carrot, no stick.
So here’s an alternative. Each MP should cast one hundred votes in Parliament – if one hundred per cent of that MPs constituents turned out to vote. If only half did, they only receive fifty votes, and so on. It doesn’t matter whether the votes were for the person who won, or even if they were spoiled, but they must have gone out to vote. No-one is forced to vote, but if they don’t, their area loses say in Parliament. The same for other elections, mutatis mutandis. That suddenly changes the rational-voter calculation dramatically in favour of voting.
The calculation also changes for parties. A lot more people are going to vote. You can’t win the election by nudging the few people in marginal seats who make the difference; you have to engage, hopefully, in a broader, calmer debate.
If they still can’t be bothered to vote, let them have less representation, too.
I think that we should educate people better into understanding what their vote stands for, rather than saying that some peoples’ opinions matter more than others.
Obviously there are problems with tactical voting or random selection, but democracy means the rule of the people – not of the few who have better knowledge of politics.