Universal Turnout as a Democratic Goal: A Call for an Incentivized and Digitalized Voting System

McGill University

Universal Turnout as a Democratic Goal: Why Canada Must Adopt an Incentivized and Digitalized Voting System

Nico Wada PHIL446, Prof. Weinstock April 27, 2018

As industrialized democracies around the world encounter prominent declines in voter turnout rates, nations are grappling with how to entice citizens to arrive at the polls on election day. I argue that Canada must aim to maximize voter turnout rates by implementing institutional reform measures. While elections and voting have an assumed importance in any democracy, some commentators maintain that low voter turnout is a negligible trend. Rejecting this view, I justify the value of high-turnout elections before launching into discussion of my proposed remedy. I begin by demonstrating that, because disadvantage is a major predictor of voter abstention, low-turnout elections tend to perpetuate social inequality and produce less democratically desirable outputs. Vulnerable to the issue of low turnout, I describe Canada’s current voting system as procedurally flawed. In agreement with philosophers like David Estlund, I argue that, absent a just structure, a democracy lacks both legitimacy and authority.

Establishing that voluntary voting systems must be restructured so as to maximize participation rates, I propose that Canada adopt a digitalized and incentivized voting solution. By replacing paper ballots with an “e-voting” mechanism and fining non-attendees, voting becomes a more broadly accessible and encouraged activity. While my notion of compelling citizens to vote invites criticism, I conclude by offering a full-fledged defense of my proposal as a favorable reform to the Canadian democratic system.

Discussion of my revised voting system requires an antecedent explanation of the threat that low voter turnout poses to the ideal of democracy. As etymology suggests, the founding principle of democracy is providing means for giving power (kratos) to the people (demos), not to an individual or restricted class. Following this description, I agree with Abraham Lincoln’s definition of a proper democracy as one “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The democratic structure is valuable precisely because it allows citizens, with their diverse range of

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opinions, to make political decisions through a procedure in which they have an equal opportunity to shape the composition of their elected governments, and hence the policies those governments adopt. In any democracy, voting is the essential mechanism by which the people can communicate their preferences, consent, and dissent. While a truism to some, this claim is disputed by critics like Annabelle Lever who describe voting as “at best, only one form of democratic participation and, from some perspectives, not an especially important or attractive one.”1 I concede that elections are unable to perfectly aggregate the diverse preferences of all citizens, however I deny the existence of any favorable or superior alternatives. Citizens can indeed engage in other forms of political participation, such as contacting public officials, boycotting products, donating to campaigns, engaging in political protests, and so on. However, I maintain that the vote is a unique political act. Elections not only determine political actors, but the guiding one-vote, one-value principle is intended to ensure that democratic power is equally distributed among the demos.

While I’ve described voting as a valuable instrument of communication, low-turnout elections yield results which fail to satisfy the participatory democratic ideal. A wealth of empirical data demonstrates that elections aggregate the preferences of an unrepresentative sample of the voting population. Arend Lijphart’s study in the American Political Science Review, for example, marshals the demographics of voter participation among industrialized democracies around the world. After an expansive survey of relevant political science reports, Lijphart concludes: “The inequality of representation and influence are not randomly distributed but systematically biased in favor of more privileged citizens—those with higher incomes, greater wealth, and better education—and against less advantaged citizens.”2 As a result of this

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A. Lever, “Compulsory Voting: A Critical Perspective,” British Journal of Political Science 4 (4), 2008, 909.

A. Lijphart, “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma,” American Political Science Review 91 (1), 1997, 1.

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behavior, social norms develop that further turnout divides among privileged and non-privileged citizens. When a poor, unemployed woman fails to cast her ballot, she intuits that others in her situation likely abide by the same norm and rationally abstains her vote. Richard Hasen refers to this situation as a case of “social failure,” occurring when “the norm [of voting] fails to emerge in some communities even though a group’s welfare would be maximized if the norm existed.”3 Voter abstention is therefore not a neutral trend, but a phenomenon concentrated among groups experiencing one or more forms of exclusion or deprivation.

This insightful demographic account of voter participation rates cannot be dismissed or ignored as trivial. As American political scientist V.O Key noted decades ago: “The blunt truth is that politicians and officials are under no compulsion to pay much heed to classes and groups of citizens that do not vote.”4 Paul Martin confirms Key’s claim in his study of the correlation between voting patterns and the allocation of federal discretionary spending to those locations in the United States. In counties with high turnout figures, Martin’s data reveals “substantially higher per capita federal expenditures.”5 Conducting a Citizen’s Participation Study, Sidney Verba asked active respondents if an issue or subject matter existed that animated their activity.

Unsurprisingly, Verba found that “the disadvantaged are more than twice as likely as the advantaged to refer to basic needs—food, housing, health care, and the like.”6 While disadvantaged citizens value government assistance and involvement more than their advantaged peers, their needs tend to be overlooked as a result of their low turnout rates. The irrationality of the voluntary voting system results in a host of negative consequences. Lisa Hill describes these consequences in her work, Compulsory Voting Defended, as “morally unsatisfying properties,” 3

R. Hasen, “Voting without Law?” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144 (5), 1996, 2167.

V.O.Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, Harvard UP, 1949, 527.

5 P. S Martin, “Voter Turnout, Attentive Publics and Congressional Allocation of Federal Money,” American Journal of Political Science 47 (1), 2003, 122.

6 S. Verba, “Would the Dream of Political Equality Turn out to Be a Nightmare?” Perspectives on Politics 1 (4), 2003, 671.

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which include exacerbation of elite power, socioeconomic bias, violation of the one-vote, onevalue principle, and unrepresentativeness, “all of which undermine the participatory democratic ideal.”7 In Democratic Authority, David Estlund describes citizens as morally obligated to comply with the outcomes that arise from epistemically valuable political structures. Drawing from Estlund’s philosophical framework, epistemic proceduralism, I characterize the law as legitimate and binding only when it follows from democratic procedures that are just. Because Estlund believes formulating a theory of democratic authority around egalitarian, result-based criteria justifies the inferior use of a randomized, “coin-flipping” system of decision-making, he abides by a very minimalist substantive standard for procedural justice. Epistemic proceduralism, he claims, allows for citizens to think and make decisions together, pooling together a rich store of epistemic values, which promote “substantively just decisions better than a random procedure.”8 While in agreement with Estlund up to this point, he mistakenly characterizes a just democratic structure as one that simply allows for citizens to influence decision-making. With a disproportionate amount of disadvantaged citizens failing to cast their vote each election day, Estlund’s procedure cannot ensure that outcomes will in fact be “better than random.” For the abovementioned reasons, any voluntary voting system is vulnerable to producing undemocratic results and therefore demands structural reform.

I agree with Hill’s claim that “the mere opportunity to vote is not enough to make a system as democratic as it should be.”9 The democratic goal should be not just universal suffrage, but universal or near-universal turnout. A useful analogy between the democratic

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L. Hill, “Turnout, Abstention, and Democratic Legitimacy,” Compulsory Voting: For and Against, Cambridge UP, 2014, 134.

D. Estlund, “Epistemic Proceduralism,” Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework, Princeton UP, 2009, 12.

9 L. Hill, “Turnout, Abstention, and Democratic Legitimacy,” Compulsory Voting: For and Against, Cambridge UP, 2014, 133.

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system and the economic system helps to clarify this argument. The national ethos of the United States is the “American dream,” the ideal by which any American, regardless of birth or class, can aspire to high attainment and material success. Recognized globally as promoting entrepreneurship and innovation, the American capitalistic system demonstrably provides citizens with the opportunity for upward economic mobility. However, the opportunity for citizens to achieve financial success does not ensure that the system is structurally ideal. As Hill states: “Formal equality of economic opportunity is not enough to eradicate poverty in developed economies.”10 Like welfare measures in an economic system, my digitalized and incentivized voting reform creates a more procedurally just democracy by aiming to correct the social failure of low voter turnout in order to promote substantively better outcomes.

Establishing that a just system is one that encourages maximum voter participation, I argue that Canada must forgo its use of paper ballots in favor of a digitalized voting solution.

This process, “e-voting,” allows Canadians to cast ballots from the comfort of their home, office, local coffee shop, or even while away on business or leisure. Through the use of an authenticated web portal, registered e-voters are given access to their ballots an entire month before a select poll closing date. Because the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) reports that 87% of all Canadian households are connected to the Internet, the e-voting platform is widely accessible. The CIRA does list Canadians in the lowest income quartile as having less household Internet connection, however a commute to the local library to access a public computer requires equal, if not less, effort than a trip to the voting booth on election day. Furthermore, the likelihood that an “unconnected” citizen’s neighbor, family member, or friend possesses a connected device is probable to the point of vitiating this “digital divide” concern.

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Ibid, 133.

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The accessibility of the digitalized system can also be evaluated in terms of opportunity cost, which measures and defines cost by the value of what is given up in exchange. Lowincome single parents of children under 5 years of age composed of a mere 36% of the vote in the 2011 Canadian election.11 For a single mother working a minimum-wage job, casting a paper ballot requires enduring the tedium of traffic and long lines and translates to costly time away from other, more pressing household or financial responsibilities. Furthermore, Brad Gomez and his colleagues provide extensive test of the claim that bad weather results in lower levels of voter turnout. According to their analysis, rain “significantly reduces voter participation by a rate of just less than 1% per inch, while an inch of snowfall decreases turnout by almost .5%.”12 The data also indicates that bad weather benefited the Republican Party’s vote share in both the 1960 and 2000 American presidential elections, an insightful finding considering that a majority of disadvantaged citizens tend to vote Democrat.13 Homeless individuals, possessing notoriously low turnout rates, likely view the benefit of voting inferior to the cost of finding private transportation to arrive at the polls in inclement weather. As Hill describes, “bad weather seems to be “the last straw” for these marginal voters, who are already less predisposed to vote in the first place.”14 By allowing citizens to vote remotely and at their leisure during a multi-week period, the e-voting mechanism facilitates the voting process and subsequently reduces its opportunity cost for the disadvantaged members of society making up the majority of the nonvoter cohort.

While my aim is not to provide an overly technical account of the e-voting platform, any credible defense of digitalized voting must address its major stumbling block, namely security 11

S. Sharanjit et al., “Factors Associated with Voting,” Statistics Canada Catalogue 75 (1), 2012.

B.T Gomez et al., “The Republicans Should Pray for Rain: Weather, Turnout and Voting in U.S Presidential Elections,” Journal of Politics 69 (3), 2007, 649.

13 J. Sides et al., “What if Everyone Voted?” American Journal of Political Science 47 (1), 2003, 75-90.

14 L. Hill, “Turnout, Abstention, and Democratic Legitimacy,” Compulsory Voting: For and Against, Cambridge UP, 2014, 152.

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concerns. I argue that the implementation of effective safeguard mechanisms renders the evoting system no less vulnerable than the traditional system in place today. Economist Klaus Schwab describes the modern era as in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), characterized by seemingly exponential technological growth “fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”15 Until recently, the act of transferring money through a digital banking application was fraught with obstacles. However, financial technologies are now so advanced, reliable, and efficient that customers expect far more than basic services. Serving billions of people and moving trillions of dollars a day, the global financial system is comparable to the voting system in terms of its scale and functional importance. The e-voting platform can therefore be modeled using the same trusted technology, blockchain, which functions as a decentralized ledger of transactions, where every transaction is immutable and built following predefined rules. An increasingly prominent and evermore reliable technology, a blockchain network is “resilient against DDoS attacks and has no single point of failure.”16 Only the most myopic observer can regard society’s rapid digitalization trend and maintain that voting is incapable of transforming from a traditional, pencil-to-paper activity to a highly functioning digital one.17 Despite the groundbreaking technological advancements shaping the 4IR, critics may still deny that the replacement of the traditional system with a reliable, though admittedly fallible, evoting platform is a positive change. However, comparing a highly encrypted, blockchain-based e-voting structure to a traditional voting system reveals that the latter confronts an equal amount 15

K. Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org/about/the-fourth-industrialrevolution-by-klaus-schwab.

16 W.K Meijer et al., Digital Voting Pass, TU Delft, 2017, v.

17 Nations like Estonia have already made the digital transition, indicating that great strides have been achieved in developing a trustworthy technology.

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of potential security risks. One parallel threat is a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, whereby a voter is unable to cast his or her vote. In the e-voting context, this occurs when connection error inhibits access to the election network. While a troubling concern, DOS attacks are common and equally disruptive in almost any non-digital election procedure. For example, in the March 5, 2002, primary election in California, a minor malfunction occurred resulting in 121 out of nearly 5,000 precincts in Los Angeles County to open polling stations late. According to a report by County Clerk, Conny McCormack, problems in even a relatively few precincts can impact more than 100,000 registered voters.18 Because e-voters can cast their digital ballots well before election day, the e-voting system makes it much less likely that a DOS attack could “take out” an entire election.

An additional concern facing both the traditional and digital systems involves the issue of voter fraud. Critics of e-voting, for example, worry that a hacker could potentially permeate the digital voting network to assume another e-voter’s identity. This threat, however, already exists in the world of traditional absentee voting. Other than a signature, no authentication mechanism exists to ensure that the person who requested an absentee ballot is the person who completed it. By requiring e-voters to authenticate their identity electronically before and after receiving their online ballot, an e-vote is a more secure alternative to the absentee ballot.

Ultimately, elections today are fraught with innumerable risks from voting machines that fail to work, polls that never open or open late, and ballots that are cast but never counted. A risk comparison analysis, albeit a brief one, reveals that the concerns associated with e-voting apply equally to voting in other domains. The transition to a digitalized voting system is not a daring, Silicon Valley pipe dream, but a serious and realistic proposal.

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C. McCormack, “March 5, 2002, Primary Election: Problems, Solutions, and Resources Needed for Improvement,” Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, 8.

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The accessibility of the e-voting platform will assist in increasing voter turnout rates, however my reform also involves imposing a set fine on all voters who decide to opt out of the election process. While my voting system will be compulsory in a sense, it will not adopt any of the harsh participation measures seen in areas like Cyprus and Singapore, where nonvoters are threatened with potential jail sentences or removal from the electoral register. To function as a proper incentive, the value of the fine should be roughly equivalent to the Australian charge of $20, which has proven to be a successful deterrent figure given that an average of 95% of citizens casting a ballot each election year.19 Though basing my reform on the Australian model, a study by Sarah Birch reports that “those who study the supposedly efficient mechanisms for the enforcement of ‘compulsory voting’ [in Australia] often point out that relatively few people are penalized for non-participation.”20 Because the fine must be enforced to ensure that voting is a properly incentivized activity, my e-voting platform once again functions as a superior alternative to the traditional system. As an online database, the platform maintains an organized and accurate digital record of which citizens fail to vote. Nonvoters can therefore be expertly screened and appropriately penalized.

This reform aims to resolve the conflict between the democratic ideals of participation and equality, however compulsory measures are often viewed as violating a third democratic ideal, namely that of individual freedom. Criticism of my nonvoter fine therefore hinges on the principle that citizens are free to decide whether or not they choose to vote. If voter abstention is indeed a right, punishing those who abstain is undemocratic. While undeniable that compulsion of any kind limits individual freedom, a duty to vote is comparable to the obligation to pay taxes,

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Given that the average turnout in Australia under voluntary voting before 1925 was only about 62%, this figure represents a mean turnout difference of more than 28% suggesting that the $20 fine is an appropriate deterrent.

20 S. Birch, “A Typology of Compulsory Voting,” Full Participation, Manchester UP, 2008, 6.

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military conscription, compulsory school attendance, and jury duty. If these duties are accepted as democratic solutions to collective action problems, and abstention leads to social failure, the normative objection to an incentivized voting system is illogical. Furthermore, this criticism rests on a fundamentally flawed assumption that nonvoting is a choice. As Hill states: “Because disadvantage is a major predictor of abstention, there is clearly more to explaining low turnout than the exercise of “principled deference”; autonomy; “free, equal and reasoned collective action”; self-government; and democratic choice.”21 While some nonvoters willfully decline to cast their vote, others abstain for the reasons previously explored, namely accessibility issues and rational compliance to a social norm.

An unsatisfied critic might still contend that the metaphoric “silence” of abstention functions as an act of political communication. Franz Neumann describes political alienation as a “conscious rejection of the whole political system which expresses itself in apathy.”22 An alienated voter might therefore abstain to voice discontent with the choice of election candidates or the entire system overall. Éric Bélanger’s study on Canadian antiparty attitudes and vote choice reveals that citizens who express generalized “antipartyism” are significantly likely to abstain their vote.23 Similarly, a report by Lyn Ragsdale and Jerrold Rusk found that “dissatisfaction” was the leading characteristic among Senate nonvoters in the United States.24 Because candidate disapproval is proven to contribute to abstention rates, I propose that a “none of the above” choice appear on voter ballots as a means of capturing negative voter attitudes.

Referred to as “positive abstention,” this option allows for democratic expression that is more

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L. Hill, “Turnout, Abstention, and Democratic Legitimacy,” Compulsory Voting: For and Against, Cambridge UP, 2014, 147.

F. Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” The Democratic and Authoritarian State, ed. H. Marcuse, NY: Free Press, 1957, 290.

23 É. Bélanger, “Antipartyism and Third-Party Vote Choice: A Comparison of Canada, Britain, and Australia,” Comparative Political Studies 37 (9), 2004, 1054.

24 L. Ragsdale and J.G. Rusk, “Who are Nonvoters? Profiles from the 1990 Senate Elections,” American Journal of Political Science 37 (3), 1993, 721.

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meaningful than the blank or spoiled ballots that alienated voters might flippantly cast to avoid my penalty fine. Furthermore, as a channel for voicing discontent, “none of the above” voter percentages can be used to more accurately tally candidate satisfaction rates. By allowing discontented voters to voice their opinion, nonvoting loses its symbolic value as speech.

Overall, the guiding one-vote, one-value principle is intended to empower citizens with an equal opportunity to engage in the democratic process. However, as empirical data suggests, groups experiencing one or more forms of exclusion or deprivation are proven to possess higher voter abstention rates. Because political actors tend to ignore the needs of nonvoters, a situation of social failure occurs whereby “worse than random” outcomes are generated that fail to maximize group welfare. In agreement with Estlund’s philosophical framework, epistemic proceduralism, a legitimate and authoritative democracy must follow from a just procedure.

Without efficient measures in place to accomplish the truly democratic goal of universal or nearuniversal turnout, Canada’s voluntary system is procedurally flawed. I therefore propose that the traditional Canadian voting structure transition to an incentivized, e-voting platform to render voting a more broadly accessible and encouraged activity. After defending my reforms against a host of anticipated criticisms, I maintain that a truly just Canadian system must demand maximum voter participation. Providing citizens with the mere opportunity to vote is not a sufficient means of realizing the participatory democratic ideal.

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Works Cited Bélanger, Éric. “Antipartyism and Third-Party Vote Choice: A Comparison of Canada, Britain, and Australia.” Comparative Political Studies 37 (9), 2004, 1054.

Birch, Sarah. “A Typology of Compulsory Voting,” Full Participation, Manchester UP, 2008, 6.

Estlund, David. “Epistemic Proceduralism,” Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework, Cambridge UP, 2014, 133.

Gomez, Brad et al., “The Republicans Should Pray for Rain: Weather, Turnout and Voting in U.S Presidential Elections,” Journal of Politics 69 (3), 2007, 649.

Hasen, Richard. “Voting without Law?” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144 (5), 1996, 2167.

Hill, Lisa. “Turnout, Abstention, and Democratic Legitimacy,” Compulsory Voting: For and Against, Cambridge UP, 2014, 125-153.

Key, V.O Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, Harvard UP, 1949, 527.

Lever, Annabelle. “Compulsory Voting: A Critical Perspective,” British Journal of Political Science 4 (4), 2008, 909.

Lijphart, Arend. “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma,” American Political Science Review 91 (1), 1997, 1.

Martin, Paul. “Voter Turnout, Attentive Publics and Congressional Allocation of Federal Money,” Ameircan Journal of Political Science 47 (1), 2003, 122.

McCormack, Conny. “March 5, 2002, Primary Election: Problems, Solutions, and Resources Needed for Improvement,” Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, 8.

Meijer, Wilko et al., Digital Voting Pass, TU Delf, 2017, v.

Neumann, Franz. “Anxiety and Politics,” The Democratic and Authoritarian State, edited by Herbert Marcuse, New York: Free Press, 1957, 290.

Ragsdale, Lyn and Jerrold G. Rusk, “Who are Nonvoters? Profiles from the 1990 Senate Elections,” American Journal of Political Science 37 (3), 1993, 721.

Schwab, Klaus. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org/about/the-fourth-indstrial-revolution-by-klaus-schwab.

Sides, John et al., “What if Everyone Voted?” American Journal of Political Science 47 (1), 2003, 75-90.

Uppal, Sharanjit and LaRochelle-Côté, Sébastien, “Factors Associated with Voting,” Statistics Canada Catalogue 75 (1), 2012.

Verba, Sidney. “Would the Dream of Political Equality Turn out to Be a Nightmare?”

Perspectives on Politics 1 (4), 2003, 671.