Youth participation is a trendy topic today. If you want to be considered an active youth, you are supposed to vote. Still, I believe it is proof of courage to dare say out loud that you do not vote. The reasons why I do not vote have nothing to do with apathy, ignorance, or indifference.
I do not vote because I don’t believe in today’s democracy or in what democracy has been transformed into today. You might wrongly assume I am talking about my country only (Romania), but not exactly…I believe this is happening in many other “democratic” states around the world.
Reasons I do not vote :
1. There is no official blank vote option.
I have no means, but absolutely no means to say I don’t agree with any of the proposed candidates. Given the fact that I have no word to say in the selection of the candidates, I strongly believe this means I ultimately have no word to say in the elections’ results. Did you notice the candidates tend to be the same old faces? Were you (not being a decision-maker) ever given the chance to decide who is on the election list? Well, neither was I. Voting for someone I do not trust seems to me like a terrible compromise
2. There is no official “dismissal” vote for the elected politicians who fail to keep their promises.
In our modern but fragile democracies, citizens usually lack any means to vote “against.” Once elected, the leaders can’t be held accountable until the next elections – when they might well be re-elected due to a lack of better alternatives.
It could have been different, though, and for one time, Romanians (almost) had a chance to make history. We could have dismissed a president. A president we didn’t want any more, but whom we could only remove through a referendum. “Voting against” a politician on 29, July 2012 and in favor of the referendum didn’t feel like a compromise. It felt like doing justice. I was so excited that I thought I could do this every month. I could have fired all the corrupted leaders who had broken their promises. And I could have expressed my views in a dignified way: no more yelling to exhaustion in front of the closed doors of the official buildings!
3. Referendums are rare. People are not given the chance to decide themselves, but to vote for other persons who decide for them.
A referendum is an exception, not the rule, in a contemporary democracy. In the context I just mentioned I was thrilled at the thought I have the right to say “NO” instead of “YES”. However, I could say a lot more than “yes” or “no”. I could choose between several options, I could amend a proposal or come up with a new idea. I am a human being, therefore I could do more than stamp a piece of paper (in today’s democracies a well-trained chimp or even dog could vote with equal success!)
4. Electoral fraud is widespread. It is very common that the election results show a different will than that of the population. Sometimes there are no results at all.
You are probably familiar by now with electoral scandals and situations when both top candidates pretend to be winners. What happened this summer in Romania was even more outrageous. As there could have been no winner, since it was an exceptional impeachment referendum, the referendum was invalidated as a whole. The official reason was that too few people showed up for voting, which might be true except for the fact that few people vote in general in Romania. (There is also a debate about using electoral lists from old census as the population might have shrunk since then, but there is no real way of knowing the truth about this). The only thing which is for sure is that eight million votes were thrown away as if they had never existed and most of the politicians, regardless of their political affiliation, were actually quite happy about the solution. Dismissing a president through a referendum would have been a dangerous precedent, after all.
5. Electoral cycles are too long. Until the next elections, politicians have time to forget all their promises and citizens equally forget they were promised anything at all.
The Romanian referendum was indeed an extraordinary event (something like an UFO). Not only it was a referendum, and an impeachment vote, but it was also a call to vote between two electoral cycles. Normally, this doesn’t happen. Citizens have political rights only once in four or five years. Between two election times, citizens are supposed to stay at home and …watch.
If we voted every week or every month, the situation could have been different. Now I am sure some critical voices will say that it is not possible to replace leaders once a month as there will be no continuity in their administrative and executive work. Well, I think that it is actually possible to have at all times several experts “shadowing” the elected officials, acting as quality inspectors, being present in the offices, ready to step in at anytime and take the jobs away if the elected ones are voted out.
The Romanian referendum might have been a good example for Europe and the rest of the world, but it was ultimately a failed experiment (actually it disappeared from the democratic sky more quickly than an alien spacecraft). Despite the fact that the international press labeled it as “a power struggle “(which is accurate, actually), the referendum was also a chance for citizens to experiment a different type of voting. Still, I can have no admiration for those who initiated the referendum, as it turned out they only used it as a one-time campaign tool. The failure of the experiment proves that politicians ultimately agreed to retain the power for themselves and also agreed not to make any new attempt to share it with the citizens.
To sum up, in today’s democracies we can only vote once in a few years, in that moment, we are only allowed to say one word which is “yes” (as we are only given the option of choosing between one of the imposed candidates), we have no power to control fraud and we are all manipulated before and after the elections. Finally, we can do nothing if the successful candidate fails to fulfill our expectations. I believe this is not exactly the definition of democracy. So, is voting in the so-called democracy really a proof of active citizenship and political activism?
A version of this article appeared in the World Youth Movement for Democracy October 2012 Newsletter
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