Norman Ornstein has proposed the adoption of a mandatory voting system for congressional and presidential elections.

In a recent op-ed entitled "Vote or Else" appearing in the New York Times, Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, proposed the adoption of a mandatory voting system for congressional and presidential elections. The rational for this proposal was based upon a perceived problem and a solution used elsewhere.

The Problem: ". . . participation rates of about 10 percent or less of the eligible electorate in many primaries to 35 percent or so in midterm general elections to 50 percent or 60 percent in presidential contests, the name of the game for parties is turnout – and the key to success is turning out one's ideological base. Whichever party does a better job getting its base to the polls reaps the rewards of majority status.

"And what's the best way to get your base to show up at the polls? Focus on divisive issues that underscore the differences between the parties."

The Solution: "Here's a possible solution: mandatory voting. A number of countries, including Singapore, Cyprus, Austria and Belgium, have forms of mandatory voting. But Australia, a sprawling polity like ours, provides perhaps the best example of why it bears consideration for the United States." According to this resident scholar of a most prestigious conservative policy think tank, the answer is getting the vote up to 80-95% of the eligible electorate as is the case in Australia by threatening those who don't vote with increasingly severe fines for each subsequent infraction.

The Rationale: "If there were mandatory voting in America, there's a good chance that the ensuing reduction in extremist discourse would lead to genuine legislative progress. These days, valuable Congressional time is spent on frivolous or narrow issues (flag burning, same-sex marriage) that are intended only to spur on the party bases and ideological extremes."

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Aside from the fact that there is absolutely no evidence that Australia or any of the other mandatory voting countries have less (or more) political divisiveness, and if they do have less, that this is a result of penalizing the electorate's choice not to vote, the silliness of this proposal is of course its seriousness. But before we address the silliness of its seriousness at the conceptual level, we thought we might pause to examine its silliness at the empirical "scientific" level.

An examination of all of the so-called mandatory voting countries does not support the notion that political systems with credible representative government use this penalty system or that if they do it leads to a more reasoned political discourse. And, among the bona fide representative political systems that do have some form of mandatory voting, strict enforcement is the exception not the rule. Australia is one of those exceptions to be sure. But, in Australia the record does not suggest the system successfully moves political discourse and representative government in any positive directions. For example, 20% of the electorate avoids the penalties by not registering to vote at all because the law only applies to those who register. Of the 80% who register, five percent waste their votes by "spoiling" the ballot (presumably by defacing it in some fashion or just not marking anything). Beyond this, you have what has become known as the "donkey" (i.e., mindless) votes named appropriately after the "pin the tale on the donkey" game.  And, you have what one might label the "robot" votes of those voters who, having been forced to come vote, simply vote party line. That such a system would eliminate political divisiveness at best appears as wishful and at worst just plain wrong-headed and wrong.

For example, the so called “ideological base” is, according to Ornstein, motivated by animus and zealotry. Fine. You have that in America and Australia. You also have a fairly large segment of non-committed voters of both parties that waffle. Those of the wafflers that come to vote without threats of fines arguably are small in number but vote because they have a reason to cast their vote one way or another. This exists in both countries. Following our scholar’s logic, that still leaves a large segment of moderate potential voters not sufficiently motivated to vote because they just don’t care enough or because they have been turned off to politics. Having been forced by threat of legal sanction to come out and waste a day voting, they still neither care about the issues nor have any interest to vote. They do so per force. So, either they are smart and don’t register at all, they “donkey” their votes, or they mindlessly vote along party lines. At best, all this means for our scholar’s thesis is that the ideological political divisiveness he decries will take place during the party registration drives and not during the election campaigns.

Moreover, according to many political scientists in Australia, the lack of political divisiveness during the election process is more a fact of religious and political apathy than mandatory voting. Thus, Dr. Marion Maddox, in her monograph entitled, "For God and Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics," produced for the Australian Parliamentary Fellows Program, wrote:

Modern Australia has been called 'the world's most secular society'. While that claim may be disputed (for example, by New Zealand), religion is seldom regarded as a particularly revealing or interesting dimension of Australian national life. Ecclesiastical statements on political issues gain a measure of public attention, but church attendances are in decline. The much-vaunted growth of immigrant and 'new' religions in fact takes up only a tiny percentage of the slack. Sectarianism, once a defining feature of the Australian party system, has faded.

So, too, if one believes the 'Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee' school, has political passion. Opinion polls show declining public faith in political processes, decreasing party identification among voters and high levels of ignorance and misinformation about political players and institutions. Victorian etiquette is no longer needed to quarantine once incendiary topics: religion and politics have become the things no one would bother to discuss at the dinner table. [Footnotes omitted.]

But this malaise, like in America, seems to grip the “middle.” For at the extremes, plenty of Australians are talking about the “fragmentation” that is taking place under John Howard, a man the Australians themselves liken to President Bush:

For Australia the war on terrorism contributes to the process of civic fragmentation that the Howard Government has fostered since coming to power in 1996. Civil society could perish in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, where difference is treason (Muslims are all potential terrorists, homosexuals are enemies of the family, and anyone disagreeing with the government is routinely accused of being ‘un-Australian’); where trust in politicians is low; where people struggling with poverty, mental illness or the care of aged family members receive too little help; and where rates of depression and youth suicide continue to rise.
The Howard Government did not create these ills, but it can be argued that it intensified them and makes little effort to alleviate them.
Cusack, Carole M., “The future of Australian secularism: Religion, civil society and the American alliance,” Australian Review of Public Affairs (10 October 2005).

Sounds a lot like America from this side of the ocean.

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Now that we’ve understood the level of scholarship, at least empirically, with which we are dealing, we turn to the silliness of this proposal as a serious conceptual matter. It is serious because it is in fact the maturation of the “Great Idea” we have developed as a critique of modern political order: the science-democracy obversion. If science achieves certainty, not by any given theory or even by its experimental method but through its use of symbolic abstraction via mathematical physics in a world reduced to matter and method, then all else of man’s existence becomes an uncertainty and mere belief. Given that, democracy as method in search of a new political order replaces all of those old time religious and philosophical notions of providence, purpose, and telos, of virtue, faithfulness, and fidelity, of civic responsibility, patriotism, and peoplehood.

Democracy and the plebiscite recognize that all of political order is mere uncertain belief. Granting each man an equal voice reduces all to the lowest common denominator. Virtue and the Truth of Existence are now the tallying up of numbers, i.e., votes, in a methodological replacement for meaning. There is no wonder of course that our Founding Fathers rejected democracy and mob rule. I have written before and do so again here that our constitution as originally crafted was an architecture of political order to both embrace the sins of the Enlightenment and avoid its rawest dangers. Thus, the power of the people as a people rested with the smallest politically constituted bodies, the states and local governments; the federal government was significantly constrained by the first ten amendments. (This we know was undone by the post-Civil War 14th Amendment and the Supreme Court’s perversion of this poorly crafted amendment.) Further, national elections were not a popular vote, except in the weaker of the legislative houses. Senators, occupying the more august, deliberative, and important body, were elected by state legislatures. The president by an Electoral College system. And, of course, only white males voted. All but the electoral system choosing our president has been undone. The system of government radically altered. The power of representative government has moved from local and more intimate relationships where common religious and moral groundings worked well to forge a weltanschauung to distant anonymous ones where “pluralism” and “multiculturalism” rule. Democracy (and science) advocates will of course applaud these changes viscerally.

Now, what would happen if there were a serious move by enough people to challenge the very premise of the science-democracy obversion? An initiative or campaign that suggested by its Reasoned yet silent protest that Politics as Usual – a place where all of political order, national existence, and peoplehood amount to no more than mere beliefs in an ideological battleground of “beliefs” and “votes” — would no longer govern their lives as the proper venue of political participation. What would happen if a large segment of the conservative constituency said enough is enough. By participating in the ideological debates, we are acceding to the obversion. We refuse. Literally, “Don’t Vote, it only encourages them!”

One thing would most assuredly happen and another might. The sure thing is that conservatives, and especially secular conservatives, would either insult you for aiding and abetting “the liberal enemy” or dismiss you because your approach is not “strategic” or “tactical” (liberals, on the other hand, would not have a clue about what was going on). And, at least at some level, this latter criticism would be true. But that simply means that not everything in political order or in man’s existence is to gain ground on someone else. Sometimes, it is to do the proper or virtuous thing. In fact, the notion that all of political life is a contest between equally uncertain “ideas” is the deep meaning of the science = certainty / democracy = uncertainty obversion.

That does not mean that worlds cannot be moved with such an initiative and that it won’t turn out quite strategic. Imagine the impact of such a campaign embraced by mostly religious conservatives. The ground would shake; the earth, or at least our part of it, would metaphorically rotate its axis ninety degrees. But that is what happens when men participate with their soul and with a Reason that founded the West, a Reason which once co-existed with Revelation. What we now term reason, is nothing more than ratiocination or the crunching of numbers; the language of bees.

But, you note, the insults and dismissal is what I say would happen in the face of such a challenge to Politics as Usual. What, you ask, do I suggest might be the second response by conservatives to such a Null Vote Campaign?

How about a law that made such a gesture illegal? Ridiculous?