Is High Voter Turnout Indicative of a Successful Democracy and Freedom?

Many efforts at election reform routinely tout the desirability of high voter-turnout as if it were a universally accepted "good." The suggestion is that if more people vote, democratic principles are reinforced. Occasionally, re-examination of such "universal truths" is appropriate.


In some countries, like Australia, high turnout results from compulsory voting. However, forcing one to vote does not inevitably support notions of democracy. More nefarious examples, such as elections in Iraq under Saddam Hussein a few years ago, intimate that voting is not necessarily indicative of freedom or a flourishing democracy. As John Hickman, an Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Berry College has noted:

The basic problem with treating high voter turnout as the evidence that an election is democratic is that it substitutes considerations of quantity for considerations for quality. Elections in democracies are mechanisms for people to choose collectively from among alternative possible leaders. That's why real democrats care whether elections are sufficiently free and fair to present voters with meaningful choices and to record their decisions accurately. In contrast, elections in authoritarian states are mechanisms for people to legitimate government by leaders who have already chosen by other means. That's why authoritarians focus so much on high voter turnout.

Comparing the 2003 parliamentary elections in unambiguously democratic Switzerland and unambiguously authoritarian North Korea helps make the point. Swiss voters could choose candidates from six major political parties with comparable campaign resources and many minor protest political parties, and the votes that they cast actually determined which political parties formed the next government. North Korean voters were presented with a much simpler decision. They could vote 'yes' for the single slate of candidates selected for them by the leadership of the Korean Worker's Party. Of course, if they [were] feeling particularly self-destructive on election day, they could always vote 'no.' Voter turnout in the Swiss election was a miserable 44.5 percent, low even by the standards of the other wealthy democracies, while voter turnout in the North Korean election approached 100 percent. If voter turnout is really the proper indicator of a democratic election, then we would have to conclude that North Korea is a model democracy and Switzerland a rank tyranny.
(For the complete article, see http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0410a/afghanhighturnout.html ).

Would our nation be better served by everyone being forced to cast a ballot, regardless of interest or knowledge concerning the issues, or with a lesser number of well-informed voters? Our country has already experienced people who felt no compunction announcing to the nation that they were unable to fill out a punch card, or some variation of "I was too stupid to read my ballot." (For a related article, see Jonah Goldberg's article from 2006, "We Don't Need Beavis and Butt-Head Voters,"

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2006/07/28/we_dont_need_beavis_and_butt-head_voters ). Our nation also has witnessed, and participated in, the tyranny of the majority. Several initiatives have been passed by "the people," with little or no thought of the unintended consequences that followed.

Long ago, we chose a representative republic form of government over direct democracy. A variation of the following quote, often attributed to Professor Alexander Tytler (1747-1813), reminds us that pure democracy has had its critics since our nation's founding: "Democracies fail when people awaken to the fact that they can vote themselves generous gifts (largesse) from the public treasury." More recently, Josef Stalin is credited with saying, "It is enough for the people to know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." Both of these quotes support the notion that high voter turnout is not necessarily a positive thing.

This article is not intended to dissuade well-intentioned efforts towards voting modifications and improvements. It certainly does not advocate that anyone be denied the franchise. It merely questions the premise that higher voter turnout is desirable, especially as it relates to election reform, and cautions advocates for reform to consider this alternate view when contemplating success criteria for their proposals.