Australia has answer?

Editorial

While the final count had not been tallied as of press time, voter turnout for the recent B.C. election was estimated at about 52 percent. A similar percentage of eligible voters turned out for the 2009 election – the last time more than 60 percent of the province’s electorate turned out to vote was 1991 (64.03 percent); more than 70 percent, 1983. Decreasing participation in one of the most important aspects of the democratic process is, to say the least, a worrying trend.

And it’s not just in British Columbia. Federally, the 2011 election saw a rise in voter turnout from 2008, but still only reached just above 61 percent – an 80 percent-ish voter turnout marked the late 1950s and early 1960s in Canada. In Israel, the 2013 voter turnout was just under 64 percent, compared to above 75 percent during the 1970s and ’80s, and above 80 percent in the 1950s and ’60s (with one exception, in 1951, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, when it was 75.1 percent).

The United States also has seen a decline, with a turnout in 2012 of 57.5 percent – in 2008, turnout reached 62.3 percent, “the highest percentage ... since 64.8 percent voted for president in 1960. It was the third highest turnout since women were given the right to vote in 1920,” according to a 2008 report by the Centre for the Study of the American Electorate at American University.

The same report suggested possible explanations, beginning with “an erosion of trust which began with Lyndon Johnson’s promise not to send American ground troops to Vietnam,” but extending much further. CSAE postulates as well that:

“There have been continuing questions about the responsiveness of government. There has been the atomization and fragmentation of American society – through the decline of integrating institutions, the interstate highway system and suburbanization, identity and single issue politics, and through our increasingly isolating modes of communication like television, cable and satellite, the Internet and the iPod. There has been a decline in the quality of education and the resources for it and a decline in the quantity and quality of civic education. There has been a general abdication of the broadcast visual media (as opposed to the less-watched cable and satellite channels) in the coverage of politics and public affairs. The staple of campaigns are still the 30-second reciprocal, emotive and unanswerable attack ads which denigrate every candidate and give citizens a choice between bad and awful. There has been a promotion of consumerist and libertarian values at the expense of civic engagement values and the gap between the rich and everybody else has been growing due to the active policies of government.”

Many of these concerns are relevant to Canada, and our first-past-the-post electoral system helps perpetuate the cynicism and the detachment, no doubt, when a party can, for example, gain a majority government with the support of only 22-23 percent of registered voters – and its leader losing her seat.

Electoral reform has been proposed – and rejected – in the past. A couple of provincial referenda have nixed the idea of a single transferable vote (STV) system, wherein voters rank candidates (across parties) in order of preference: those who receive the most support are elected, those with the least are not. “If a candidate receives twice as many votes as needed to get elected, the other half of each vote will be transferred to the next preference on the ballot,” explains the Fair Vote Canada website. “If a candidate is eliminated, then that candidate’s votes will also be transferred to the next preference on each ballot.”

STV is used, among other places, in Australia for the election of its Senate. For the election of its House of Representatives and for many other elections – from municipal to political party to trade-union and company board elections – it uses preferential voting. In this system, voters also rank candidates: a candidate who gets an absolute majority (50 percent plus one) is elected; if no candidate gains this majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and those votes are transferred to the other candidates according to the second preferences marked on the ballots; the process continues until one candidate has an absolute majority.

Of course, every electoral system has its benefits and drawbacks. One look at Israel’s difficulties with fringe groups gaining power in its proportional representation system is enough to scare many into staying with the status quo. However, we must be getting to the point where the status quo just isn’t acceptable. Then again, if changing the whole system is too daunting, perhaps a smaller change is feasible.

Looking again to Australia – though a couple dozen countries apparently have mandatory voting – we hearken back to previous editorials and the idea of rights and obligations in a civil society. Is it too much to require that people vote? In Australia, the fines for not voting without good cause (health reasons, for example) are minimal ($20), yet the country manages to get a turnout rate in the mid-90s, with a few percent of the ballots incorrectly completed, spoiled or left blank (“informal votes”) and others ranked in the order candidates are listed rather than by preference (“donkey votes”). While not perfect, mandatory voting would provide a much better reflection of the entire electorate’s will – and be more truly democratic.

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