• Breadcrumb navigation uses Javascript

---

The ethics of informal voting

by Simon Longstaff

With a Federal election just around the corner it won’t be long before we are all rolling up to the polling places of the land to cast our vote. For most people emotions will range from excitement to resignation to boredom. However, a few people will turn up in an incendiary mood seething at the fact that voting is compulsory.

As a matter of practice, voting is not compulsory in Australia. Rather, we are required to turn up and go through the motions. In my opinion, this is a relatively small obligation to meet as a condition of our citizenship in a vibrant democracy. The list of things we are strictly required to do is quite small (pay tax, obey the law and turn up at a polling place once every three or four years).

Within the relative privacy of the polling booth – armed with a stubby pencil and a sheaf of ballot papers – we are completely free to do more as less as we please.  Once stuffed into the ballot box any link between you and your ballot paper is forever lost. Given the length of most ballot papers for the Senate you could write ‘War and Peace’ and nobody would be any wiser! It’s just that although you may have composed a masterpiece, it will count for noting in the electoral process. Your ballot will be deemed ‘informal’.

In practice, every citizen has a choice. Anonymous voting, in secret, allows for citizens to cast valid votes – or to vote ‘informal’ as they think fit.

That is the issue I would like to consider today – should we always aim to cast a valid vote? How should we evaluate the decision deliberately to cast an informal vote?

Perhaps the best place to start is with consideration of the requirements for democracy. While democracy might not be the best form of government, I think that Winston Churchill got it right when he observed that it is the least bad alternative!

A useful way to distinguish between political systems is to look at where authority ultimately comes from. For example, a ‘theocracy’ locates ultimate authority in the person of God. An ‘aristocracy’ will derive authority from the virtuous – a plutocracy from the wealthy, and so on.

In most cases, those with the authority get to determine how a polity is governed. Sometimes, those with authority will do the job of governing themselves. At other times, intermediaries will be involved (priests and kings have often claimed the right to govern in God’s name). In the case of democracy, ultimate authority is located in the persons of the governed (sometimes referred to as the ‘sovereignty of the people’).

That is, the mark of an authentic democracy is not to be found in a particular decision making process but in the fact that those who exercise power do so as conditionally warranted by the people. Even if ‘the people’ freely choose just one person to make decisions on their behalf (eg. a popularly mandated dictatorship of the kind Machiavelli presents when describing the Roman Republic in his Discourses), society will be democratic for so long as ‘the people’ have the right to define and amend the Constitution.

What makes Australia a true democracy is not the fact that we have political parties, elected parliaments, etc. Rather, it is that our Constitution can only be amended by a majority of ordinary citizens, in a majority of States. Seen in this light, one could argue that a decision to vote ‘informal’ is a repudiation of what it means to be an Australian citizen – the ultimate source of authority in our democratic system of government. If we are the ultimate source of political authority, then we should act accordingly and cast a valid vote.

However, there may be at least one situation when an informal vote could be preferable. In circumstances where the field of candidates is, in your opinion, uniformly feeble, then anything other than an informal vote may be misleading. A valid vote will simply confer legitimacy on a candidate that, in your considered opinion, deserves nothing of the sort.

It is no small thing to be a citizen in a democracy. The right to vote was hard won. – especially by groups marginalised throughout history. So, it is somewhat perplexing that, with each election, so many people vote informal (often as a matter of accident or indifference). A valid vote is, in my opinion, the most fundamental expression of popular sovereignty.

discuss this article

---