I had a conversation yesterday with a colleague at work, and he asked me a question that I hadn’t heard yet: “are you trying to establish causal relationships…” between voter turnout and social ills, etc? It’s an interesting question, and one that I would like to address here because the answer is important to the ultimate purpose of this group and my own personal goals.
The short answer is no. I do not believe that politicians are corrupt because so few people turn out to vote, nor do I think that the ills of society rest on the shoulders of those citizens who didn’t vote. The long answer is a bit more complex.
Over the years, the rate of voter participation as it relates to the voting population as a whole as decreased by about ten percent from a maximum of 69% in 1964 to just around 60% in 2008 — highest participation rates are always during presidential elections. This is a disturbing trend by itself, but when taken against the increase in eligible voting population over the same time period reveals the real impetus for this group: the people making decisions about who will make decisions about the direction in which this country goes is a small percentage of voting-eligible society.
What we’re seeing is that there is less democratic pressure on elected officials than there is supposed to be for a republic this size. A smaller percent of an officials’ regions elected them, so they are beholden to a smaller range of constituent desires. It means that the pressure to “do the right thing” is not as strong as it should be, because the voting base is too small in comparison with their region’s population, and that voting base gets its way regardless of what is right for the region as a whole.
Will a higher voter turnout fix all of the corruption and corporatization of congress? No. Will increased citizen participation, however, give stronger voice to the people and more pressure on congress to listen to their constituents’ needs as a larger group? Absolutely.
Politicians have long subverted the purpose of the election process and turned their representational duties into a career. They are free to do this because they know that only around half of their constituents will show up and vote, so they’re really only beholden to 51% of that group. This was never the intention of the authors of the Constitution.
The intent was to have full participation of voting citizens in order to keep out the influence of minority interests: corporations, lobbyists, special interest groups, fly-by-night political parties, etc. Their intent has never come to fruition. That can change.
While we believe that there is not a causal relationship between voter turnout and political corruption, we recognize that a low voter turnout makes it easier for political corruption and factional influence to occur. Conversely, we assert that an increase in citizen participation will make it more difficult for corruption to happen and more likely that it does not go unpunished.
My job on these pages is to produce data and analysis that shows disturbing trends in voter participation in relation only to itself. My goal is to let the data feed common sense in order to get more people participating in the election process.