Published: September 04, 2008 01:14 pm            

CHRISTY: Voter apathy is no accident

This week someone wrote to me suggesting that if more people voted, we’d have better government. The suggestion was, therefore, why don’t we organize and urge people to vote.

I’ve always been a very upbeat person; anything is possible if you put your mind to it. But sometimes you find yourself shocked by your own response to people’s suggestion. Almost like when you hear your own voice on the radio or a tape recorder. You can’t believe you sound like that. Well, I couldn’t believe I was saying to this person “it’s nearly impossible to get more people to vote”. Such quick certainty — shooting down someone who wanted to work towards fixing our broken political system — shocked me and made me think.

Voter apathy is not an accident. If you carefully examine what candidates do, who they raise their money from and what they spend their money on, you realize they are not playing the same game that taxpayers imagine them to be playing.

Most politicians talk about getting people involved, asking people their opinion and empowering everyone to pull together and make a difference. But in reality, candidates for office spend all their resources identifying supporters, and then getting only those people out to vote. The result of that strategy is to win election, not to increase the total vote.

To make matters worse, political playbooks include chapters on negative advertising. Not just as a way to denigrate your opponent, but to actually turn off the electorate and suppress voter turnout. The political theory says that if you can’t convince someone to vote for you, or against your opponent, then you cannot be sure how they will vote. In that case, it’s in the candidate’s best interest to keep those voters away from the voting booth.

How do you keep people from voting? And could we ever fall for such tactics? You’d be surprised.

The tactic used to suppress voter turnout, according to the campaign playbook, is to make the election so vile and distasteful that you’d rather choose “none of the above” than go out to vote. Who among us has not said, publicly or privately, “This is the choice we have?” when considering an important election. While you’re pondering whether health care coverage will be there when you need it, or whether your children will be able to find a job and live nearby, your representative facing a difficult election will be attempting to slime his/her opponent and actually invite the opponent to do the same, while ignoring any issues whatsoever. And it’s all in carefully orchestrated — and professionally managed — effort to control turnout.

Now consider this: according to the US Census, government employ’s somewhere between 30 percent and 35 percent of the population nationally. In WNY the number is higher, and statistics have shown that government employees in WNY are paid at a higher scale then private sector employees. Is it a stretch of the imagination, mathematically, to see the lines on a graph of voter involvement and government employment meet? That politicians could actually employ all the people necessary to win an election?

So, trying to be positive, how CAN we improve voter turnout?

First of all, so long as the people needing to control voter turnout (elected officials) are also in control of the rules of elections, it’s impossible to hold out hope of change. Elected officials will never take the steps necessary to improve voter turnout. That’s not an opinion, it’s the fact, based on years of elections in this state. So what’s needed is a panel, with authority to make changes, impaneled with the single challenge of increasing voter turnout. This country is the most inventive in history. The answer doesn’t elude us, just the backbone to make the changes.

Once the elected officials are removed from the ability to control their own fate the panel of experts would change the arcane enrollment rules. People always wonder how a professional wrestler won election as Governor of Minnesota (Jesse Ventura). In Minnesota you can enroll to vote at the same time you actually vote. Since people tend not to pay attention to elections until the last 30 days or so, people in Minnesota got excited at the end of the election, registered, and voted. New York State’s rule is that you must enroll to vote 30 days prior to any election, which virtually guarantee’s low turnout.

A theme of this column lately has been “what to watch for in this years’ election process.” Not by design, but it’s just worked out that way. If recent history is a guide we can safely predict you will get through the next 60 days or so without hearing one incumbent state legislator talking about the drastic need for election reform.

Tom Christy is the founder of FAIR Government, a non-political and non-editorial educational foundation dealing with local government issues. www.fair-government.org. He encourages communication and can be reach via email at aim1986@mac.com.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.