Compulsory Voting and Inclusion: A Response to Saunders

Introduction

The issue of compulsory voting is a contentious one, with proponents on either side vowing to have democracy's best interests at heart. Indeed, several contributors to this journal (Engelen, 2009; Lacroix, 2007; Lever, 2008 and 2009) have passionately defended their positions on the enforcement of voting, whether in favour or against. On the one hand, it is claimed, the alienation from political processes experienced by those who are disadvantageously positioned within our societies merits interruption – an intervention that can only take place through legal compulsion. Those opposed to such compulsion point toward the infringement of individual liberty, as political participation should be a right of which one can avail oneself, not a duty. Alternatively, it is argued that enforcement leaves the very roots of political alienation intact, and actually serves to skew outcomes of elections through the ill-informed voting behaviour of those who are forced to vote.

Most recently, Ben Saunders (2010) has also argued that politically alienated citizens must not have an interest in, or understand politics, and with nothing at stake, should remain absent from the polling stations. This would be reflective of their choice not to vote, and would leave decision-making to the rest of the polity, as citizens who care enough, or feel they are significantly affected enough, achieve unbiased electoral results.

In what follows, I will try to counter some of Saunders' more problematic claims, and will suggest that compulsory voting need not be a matter of pro or con, but that an accommodation of the valid concerns of both sides can be broached by making voting a legal requirement, while simultaneously supplementing the shortcomings of compulsory voting through more thoroughgoing measures of reform. I will follow Iris Marion Young's (2000) example by arguing that equal inclusion surely is the mainstay of democracy, and therefore an ideal we should try to instantiate not just through singular measures, but through a multiplicity of mutually reinforcing approaches.

Electoral elitism

In his contribution to the ongoing debate on compulsory voting, Saunders briefly outlines the difficulties posed by a decline in electoral turnout. He mentions Arend Lijphart's (1997) and Lisa Hill's (2002) concerns about the representativeness of elections that draw only part of the electorate – that is, the part that is relatively well educated and well off. Disproportionality in turnout is thus linked to privilege, as those who are already marginalised find themselves even further disadvantaged through the effective exclusion of their interests and priorities from the political sphere.

Hill has attributed this vicious circle of electoral stratification, which is indicative of the stratification of citizens along social and economic lines more generally, to a sort of hopelessness, a belief that one's vote will not make a difference to the order of things. Compulsory voting is offered as a means of disrupting the workings of this alienation by integrating the excluded part of the electorate. Surprisingly, Saunders goes on to employ the rationale of the alienated citizenry (‘my vote won't matter, will not change anything’) to argue for the continued exclusion of the underprivileged from the political process.

Thus, given a situation in which ‘your neighbour had two votes in an upcoming election’, those of us with only one vote should not feel too aggrieved, as ‘it would hardly give him or her any more power over the outcome’ as ‘each vote is practically worthless and twice nothing is still nothing’ (Saunders, 2010, p. 72). If this is the case, then what is the point in any of us voting, or in having electoral systems in the first place? We might as well just hand over the reins of political rule to the privileged few, as equality of votes and, by proxy, votes for the masses, are irrelevant, and in fact, as Saunders maintains, undesirable.

As elitist as this sounds, Saunders attempts to justify his claim that ‘equality may not be necessary to democracy’ (Saunders, 2010, p. 72) by stipulating that some people will have more of an interest in a particular decision than others, as it affects them more than others. This means that those with a greater interest in a particular issue or issues should be given weighted votes, or sole votes, while those who lack such specific interest should have lesser votes, or no votes at all. Only by restricting or weighting votes can fair outcomes be ensured, allowing for those unduly affected by a decision to have the greatest say in relation to the processes affecting them.

While this may appear to be fine in theory, there are obvious objections to be made against a restriction or weighting of votes as it pertains to the exclusion of alienated citizens: first, how does one establish who is affected by a specific issue, and how do we know who is so affected to a greater or a lesser degree? This might be easier to ascertain on a local level, where issues around planning, for example, involve a specific site and the parties supporting or objecting to the work proposed to take place on that site. Even here, however, there are larger considerations to take into account, which may considerably complicate an easy identification of who has a greater or lesser interest in a decision.

For instance, the building of an incinerator in a local area has obvious implications for the specific community it is being built in – interested parties are therefore members of the community (presumably those living closest to the intended site will be affected to a greater extent than those living further away), and the company planning on building and running the incinerator. However, these kinds of plants normally do not just burn waste belonging to the ‘host’ community, but also waste belonging to the larger polity, or district; nor can we strictly limit the potential pollution, or the implications for the wider economy, to the specific area where the incinerator is being built. Also, incineration itself may be a new approach to waste management which, if proven successful, may form a greater part of future environmental policy. The stakeholders in this seemingly ‘local’ issue therefore expand to include not only members of the community and the incineration company, but the citizenry at large, other business interests and government ministers. It thus becomes far more difficult to identify who is affected by the issue of incineration and who is not, and to do so as a matter of degree.

Having said all this, it should be clear that even in those circumstances, usually in local settings, where we appear to be able to designate stakeholders easily, we run the risk of arbitrarily identifying those with increased interests in a particular decision. Were we to endow these citizens with the kind of privileged decision-making powers Saunders proposes, then this would surely lead to a skewing of electoral outcomes. Added to this, of course, is the fact that in national elections everybody is a stakeholder; hence, to restrict or to weight votes in this context amounts to disenfranchisement and is clearly undemocratic. Indeed, I agree with Lijphart's statement that ‘compulsory voting can be regarded as a natural extension of universal suffrage’ (Lijphart, 2008, p. 219).

Saunders' assertion that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with low voter turnout, despite its linkages to socio-economic disadvantage, rests on the spurious argument that a fairer system actually requires the exclusion of this part of the electorate from the political process. These alienated citizens simply are not affected by the issues at hand, and therefore abstain, effectively instantiating the kind of weighted system he advocates (Saunders, 2010, p. 73). There is, however, no evidence whatsoever to suggest that those who do not vote are affected to a lesser extent by the decisions of the polities they are a part of than those who do.

In fact, I would argue that the case is quite the contrary: it is far more likely that the interests of those who abstain from voting are marginalised in the political sphere, as their votes are not lobbied for by politicians eager to get elected. It follows, then, that this group of the electorate is far more affected, indeed adversely affected, than other, more privileged groups, and thus on Saunders' own line of reasoning, should be issued with weightier votes than the rest of the citizenry. Be that as it may, the point here is that Saunders' link between voting abstention and political affect is extremely tenuous, and dangerously serves to justify a system in which the exclusion of large, and growing, parts of the electorate can only result in an electoral elitism.

Inclusion

Iris Marion Young (2000) famously proposes a model of deliberative democracy that is thoroughly inclusive, premised upon the idea that exclusion functions in many guises. There are the more obvious ‘external’ exclusions caused by differences in wealth and social status, as well as ‘internal’ exclusions pertaining to the capacity of citizens to be heard and to make themselves heard, in processes of political deliberation (Young, 2000, pp. 53–57). Young argues that inclusion:

One way in which citizens can ‘give voice to their needs’ is through voting, hence lack of voting means a silencing of their needs, and a sidelining of their interests. By making voting compulsory, this particular method of silencing can be countered, enfranchising all those who are now effectively excluded. This would mean that equality is not merely a formality, to be availed of occasionally, as a privilege, but is actively engaged with, and given substance on a permanent basis.

On the other hand, I agree with Saunders' (2010, p. 71) and Annabelle Lever's (2008, p. 63) claims that mere enforcement of voting cannot fully address the kind of alienation that leads citizens to abstain from voting in the first place. Hence, I propose that Young's vision of inclusive democracy can be broached by making inclusion not just a matter of compulsory voting, but of implementing a host of other inclusionary measures, which opponents of mandatory voting themselves propose (for instance, Saunders cites ‘electoral reform’ and ‘striving to increase social capital’ as valid methods: Saunders, 2010, p. 71). In this way, those who have argued for or against compulsory voting might even manage to see common ground, as mandatory voting becomes part of a multi-pronged approach to tackling the exclusion of alienated citizens. Such an approach could form the beginnings of a realisation of the radical inclusion Young had in mind, as we recognise the urgency involved in making all of the electorate part of the political process, paying particular attention to those who are disadvantageously positioned within our societies.