Canada Needs a Poll Rebate

Voting turnout percentages have become a perennial problem in industrialized countries. In some places, they’re still pretty high – in Australia, for example, which enforces “compulsory voting” by making you sign in to a polling station and charging you a nominal fine if you don’t, turnout is still well above 90%. And in new democracies, strangely, they’re often pretty high too. About 70% of eligible voters turned up for those Ukrainian elections in 2006 that prompted all the hooplah and “Orange Revolution” protests. But the rest of us don’t vote much anymore – Canada tends to be around 60% these days, and the U.S. is frequently even lower.

Part of this is because the 18-25 age bracket simply has almost nobody voting, at least in Canada. Politics are pretty much irrelevant to most people my age: the aftermath of the countercultural backlash of the 1960s and 1970s has been more than successful in persuading them that all politicians and people in senior political and economic authority are hopelessly corrupt and that the institutions are beyond reform, or at least beyond easy reform, but the conclusion drawn from this seems to be that the political system just therefore has no value in their lives and isn’t worth taking the time to understand. This leads to what is commonly summarized as “apathy.” It also leads to Elections Canada making a bunch of stupid commercials during the election campaign, likening voting to improvised rap music.

The Canadian position appeared to reach new lows this year in the Albertan provincial elections, were just 41% of eligible voters came out to re-coronate the Conservatives. In a way, I can understand why someone who likes the Conservatives in Alberta wouldn’t bother to vote – since they’ve been in power for decades there and defeat at the polls seems extraordinarily unlikely – and even why someone who doesn’t like them wouldn’t bother to vote – for pretty much the same reason, as well as the fact that the antidemocratic first-past-the-post system means the Conservatives capture virtually all the seats despite having only about 50% of the popular vote.

The media has fretted and wrung its hands over the issue – see coverage by CBC and the Globe and Mail, for example – even though part of the problem is their editorial approach, in which smiling professional political “experts” tell listeners how the passive, docile “public” – that mass of emotional individuals which apparently is not supposed to include those actually reading or watching the pundit in question – is likely to react to the blatant efforts to manipulate them by politicians. To pundits, manipulation and deceit is an expected and even approved part of the political rough and tumble.

Still, the Church of the Orange Sky applauds them for wondering whether voting turnout is too low, though no one seems sure what to do about it. Into the silence and darkness the Church speaks the words of truth and light:

One way to help increase the voting rates might be to introduce compulsory voting, like the Australians did during the 1920s, in response to an election where the turnout was a shocking 60% (today, such numbers are taken as a matter of course in Canada, and even applauded as a high turnout in the U.S.). I suspect the idea of forcing people to perform civic duties might appeal to some conservatives, though libertarians would probably hit the roof, and this Church generally does not support such extensions of government authority, either. It might not even withstand a constitutional challenge, which would no doubt be launched one of a number of conservative foundations and endowments which would be worried about the prospect of several million young and poor people showing up at the polling booth and voting for the wrong elites, or even for people who aren’t elites at all.

One way most assuredly not to increase voting turnout is to limit voting by requiring people to have multiple government-issued photo ID documents on hand when showing up to vote, even if they’re already listed voters. This has the effect of disenfranchising large numbers of poor and particularly homeless people who don’t have such documents available. I know I don’t have such documents available, mainly because I’m a low-income student who will be moving again a few months and for a number of reasons haven’t bothered to update any of my government documents to reflect the address I currently live at. The original new law, introduced last year, was so poorly thought out that it also disenfranchised a large number of rural people who didn’t have standard residential mailing addresses; this was hastily corrected through new amendments.

Even in its present form, though, it introduces a profound ethical problem: is it right and just to vote as a citizen when other citizens are unable to exercise that same constitutional right? The Church has pondered whether it ought to encourage its members to abstain from voting in protest, to spoil their ballots in protest, or to attempt to disrupt the national electoral process in some other way in order to draw attention to the problem. The latter would doubtless be considered terrorism or some such, though this is not necessarily a legitimate counter-argument, and the Edible Ballot Society has been attracting the occasional headline for some years now

Nevertheless, influential right-wing conservatives within our ranks have currently limited the Church’s official position on the subject to merely urging members to vote only for those parties which have publicly protested the new law. Thus the Church may endorse only the New Democratic Party, since it is the only party with elected officials who actually protested the present laws of disenfranchisement.

In the meantime, laying aside this profound disenfranchisement, the Church has turned its attention to the question of increasing voting rates, and proposes as a partial solution to the problem that all people who present themselves at a polling station in order to vote be given $20 as compensation for doing so.

This would add as much as $500 million to the cost of holding the election (much less than that if 100% of voters don’t turn up to claim their reward, of course), but that’s not necessarily a problem. Bureaucratic overhead would be minimal and it’s basically sort of a reverse poll tax – a poll rebate, we’ll call it. Pay $20 in taxes, get $20 back at the polling booth. The government wastes money much more senselessly on a daily basis, with much less return for the electorate. We could even spend some of our current budget surplus on it.

Representatives of the Church have conducted scientific sampling of Canadian citizens and residents to solicit feedback on the subject, and have in doing so encountered a number of easily resolved objections. Some, for example, feel that a modest financial reward isn’t enough to convince people to come out and vote. Perhaps not, but this is an effort to encourage more voting, not to resolve the turnout problem entirely. People may still choose not to vote for any of a number of reasons. In the meantime, there are plenty of people in society who would vote simply because they could use an extra $20 in their food budget. Some might object to the scheme on these grounds, offering the mistaken bourgeois argument that one ought to always conduct civic duty selflessly and without prospect of reward. Not so! Corporate elites routinely manipulate the voting process with the prospect of financial reward, and much more than $20 per capita in financial reward, at that! And would people really prefer that people not vote at all than vote for the wrong reasons? Such a position is untenable given that legally we do not and cannot inquire into someone’s reasons or intentions at the polling booth. It’s not like the Church is paying people only to vote for a particular party, which I agree would be very wrong indeed.

Some conservatives may also worry that this proposal is part of a conspiracy by the Church of the Orange Sky to introduce various new schemes of wealth redistribution, since $20 means much more to certain classes of society than to others, and – in particular – much of the money for the poll rebate would actually be contributed by wealthier members of society. For example, a person with an annual income of $5000 might essentially get a free $20, having contributed nothing in taxes that year, while someone with an income of $200 000 would pay for the $20 poll rebates of not just themselves but many others.

Fair enough, but this is separate from the Church’s other systematic schemes of wealth redistribution, most of which go far beyond meagre payments to voters. Would such people argue that the protection of a small portion of their personal material wealth is more important than the maintenance of a healthy democratic civil society, especailly since their production of wealth is dependent on the rest of that civil society playing by the existing capitalist rules anyways? If worst comes to worst, we could always just yank $500 million from the military. They’d never be able to buy any more broken submarines if we did it on a regular basis, but maybe that’s for the best. This will no doubt be a controversial suggestion and the Church suggests other solutions be attempted instead. Its perspective on the Canadian military will be explored by another, separate proclamation.

~ by orangechurch on March 11, 2008.