Encouraging people to vote, and characterizing the failure to vote as an abnegation of the responsibilities of a citizen commensurate with that of any scofflaw, is perfectly okay by me. I don’t think people who refuse to inform themselves and vote should be legally punished, but neither should they be immune to scorn. They may be exercising a right, but it’s a shabby, negative right akin to the government’s inability to compel you to shower and shave: you may have a “right” to be slovenly, but you don’t have a right to everyone pretending you don’t stink. If you wish to publicly withhold your vote for principled reasons and can and will articulate why, well, you might uphold your obligation as a citizen that way. Actually I’d like space for that on the ballot. But I don’t think much of the “freedom not to vote” and here’s why: because everyone’s vote helps the whole country.
I don’t think the American experiment is about minimizing one’s obligations to one’s fellow citizens to the greatest possible extent, nor would I much like a society constructed to achieve that. Civilization is largely a cooperative endeavor, and though we in the U.S. pride ourselves on our rugged individualism, few of us are eager to actually become (in the words of the slogan) an “army of one.” So long as we want a polity at all, and to take advantage of the benefits organized society confers, we need to pick and choose a little bit. We’re not going to let everyone opt out of any activity or restriction they don’t much care for, or who’d pay taxes? We almost lost the country altogether because the freedom to own slaves was an abomination offensive to moral reason, and it had to go at whatever cost. At the same time, we have a wonderful Bill of Rights, and have generally, with some backsliding but mostly moving forward, extended those freedoms to more people and more fields of activity as we have grown. Wheresoever on the gun control spectrum you are, you have to love a country so confident in its people’s ability to choose their leaders and legislators that it codifies even the electoral losers’ right to arm themselves as they exercise their right to denounce the government.
Back to voting. Low voter turnouts harm a democracy because a) they undermine the legitimacy of the democratic process – what’s the practical difference between a country in which only a certain elite may vote and one in which only a certain elite does vote? b) it restricts the pool of candidates for office to those reflecting the values (and often the ethnicity) of the voting portion of the public; and c) the process is self-reinforcing – those who feel the government does not represent them are less likely to vote, and those who are happy with the results of an election are more likely to do so. So the voiceless class gets bigger and bigger. If everyone voted every time, candidates would appear to appeal to those groups who now aren’t considered worth approaching. Result, a more representative democracy and a more perfect union. Hence the case for a civic obligation to vote.
Oh, and for kids in Maine to appeal to McDonald’s to scrap styrofoam containers, there’s little political indoctrination there. Even McDonald’s is happy they did it (for one thing, it’s a lot cheaper), conservatives do not love nonbiodegradable garbage, and all political parties were equally involved – hardly at all. Of course, we mustn’t forget that paper replaced foam, and that one of Maine’s largest industries is … oh, why taint it, it was still a good thing.
