useless question

[calimac]

First time I've ever seen an exit pollster outside my polling place. She had a table with a pad of question forms, a box of pens, and another box to drop the completed questionnaire in. There were about 20 questions, divided among voting intentions, general political views (the toughest one was "How much do you trust the government to do the right thing?"), and personal characteristics (it's typical that I can't recall the exact answer to "What is your annual income?").

The form was evidently intended as generic to the state, for though it gave the names of the gubernatorial candidates (not a useful question for predicting the outcome: this one's pretty much in the bag), for Congress the options were "a Democratic candidate", "a Republican candidate", "other", and "did not vote". But somebody was not paying attention to our state election laws, as because of our top-two runoff system, this district has two Democratic candidates for today's election. A special card the pollster had confirmed it: if you voted for either one of them, choose option 1; this makes options 2 and 3 unusable here.

That's not only pointless but useless: the race between those two is very tight and it would be useful to have early data on voters' intentions. Certainly the only live phone calls I've gotten this election have been from polite people supporting one or the other of those candidates. (The recorded calls have been the usual selection of interestingly star-studded: Kevin Johnson and Michelle Obama on the same day, for instance.) When the caller for the candidate I did not support asked me why, I answered, which I suppose makes me partly responsible for the subsequent flood of mailers from that candidate trying to counteract that impression.

Here's something else silly: a screed against the maxim "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain." The argument comes perilously close to replicating, in far loftier tones, the "gotcha" of my trollish little brother, who likes to point out that the maxim isn't true because First Amendment. But the maxim isn't about legal rights, or even (in this loftier version) Lockean moral principles. Perhaps it should better be phrased as, "If you don't vote, you shouldn't complain about the results you get." But Mr. Lofty isn't interested in improving the phrasing, he's out to condemn the maxim-sayers for "assert[ing] that you, O virtuous voter, have the right to revoke that grant [of "fundamental human rights"] to someone because they didn’t value voting as highly as you do."

Well, yes we do have that right to revoke a grant. The grant that we have the right to revoke is the grant of a right to have your complaints heard. By the etiquette of public discourse, if by nothing else, voters have a right to a respectful hearing of their views to a degree that those who don't take the trouble to vote, but who do have the time and energy to bitch about the results, don't have.

And that's all it means. And anybody who doesn't want to listen to me on this, doesn't have to do that, either. Even though I voted.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, I think you're still illustrating my point. The system restrains majoritarian democracy when it infringes on personal autonomy, as in marriage laws or your hypothetical sex example; the system imposes majoritarian democracy when the lack of it would infringe on personal autonomy - in the case of traffic laws, the right for everyone to get where they're going in the most reasonable way.

I don't believe that state legislatures voted on red/green traffic lights in the sense that the options of green/red or orange/purple or whatever were also on the table. And if they had, it would have been different in different states, as we in fact see with other traffic laws like the way speed limits work. I was speaking of the making of the choice as to which colors mean what, and that was a technical decision made by engineers. (A bad choice, actually, because color-blindness.) Though the legislatures may have codified it, they didn't make the choice.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I think you are still not addressing the difference between "democratic mechanisms within a system that is legitimized on some other, more fundamental basis" and "democratic mechanisms as a source of legitimacy." It does not seem to me that someone who regards a particular political system as illegitimate, and refuses to vote on that basis, loses the right to object to what the system does. The contrary position seems to be a rhetorical device for silencing fundamental dissent.

Of course, in the United States, we don't have a lot of fundamental dissent. But that's actually a reason for accepting and tolerating it. And there have been less fortunate states where a huge part of the population were in fundamental dissent; indeed the history of the United States as a polity begins with such a situation.

However, this is getting into more fundamental political theory, and that can go on forever. And since I am not myself taking the position that the Constitution of the United States is fundamentally illegitimate, I have no personal stake in the matter.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Once you brought up the definition of consent, with the example of the sex lives of A through C, it shifted the discussion from the right to express non-consent to the question of the legitimacy of the thing itself that consent is being asked for. My previous two comments were written on that basis.

But, OK, we can go back again. Perhaps we could limit the original maxim to meaning that not voting should obviate complaints that the wrong candidate on the ballot won. If you don't like the winner's policies, you can say "At least I didn't vote for him" with a lot more force if you voted for the other guy than if you didn't vote at all. I think that's the real point of the maxim.

But you mean disagreement with the system entire rather than the specific winner. (Your phrase, "You consent to be governed by the winners of this election" is a bit ambiguous here.) Such a person could vote for, or if necessary, run as, a candidate with a platform to change the system. Or, if that seemed impossible, engage in revolutionary activity.* The Weathermen certainly did not consent to be governed by the winners of this election, and the question of whether they voted or not seemed kind of beside the point.

*Which the Declaration of Independence does authorize in cases of extremity - the catch being, who decides if it's extreme enough? In that case, though, it was the elected representatives of the entire voting population, not a self-appointed coterie in secret cells.