[rant] Our voter turnout still sucks

[Posteritatis]

I was at a talk by Senator Roméo Dallaire in Halifax this afternoon, 'cause I've become a humanitarian activist groupie in the last two years or so and jump at any such opportunities within earshot. (Free hint to all: Halifax is generally a good place to be such a person.) I'd seen him talk once before in London this spring. He opened both talks on a similar note, in which he castigated the audience - mostly college students both times - about their voting habits, or more to the point, their lack thereof.

He tossed out some numbers this time that have me kind of seeing red. Our voting turnout in most elections is somewhere in the sixty-percent range, you see. This sucks, but I thought it was a kind of generalized suck. I also know that the voting turnout in the 18-30 range has been abysmal as long as I've been voting; I got talked out of ignoring my first ballot and haven't missed anything above the municipal level in the nine years since. That makes me unusual in my age group though, since the turnout as a whole is usually something in the 25-30% range. That's a Bad Thing when that age group is a pretty significant chunk of the voting age population. Apparently though, the turnout in that age group is closer to fifteen percent than thirty, as of the last election. Now, I figure at least part of that was due to Harper gaming the residency-proof rules at the last minute, but that last minute came well after the slightly less horrible turnout of the previous elections.

It's had me seeing red for half the afternoon, for the most part. I blew off some of my frustrations by biting the heads off of a few dedicated anti-voters I know (and accidentally reached one in the process - score!), but that's not exactly going to Change The World either. I have no idea what kind of solutions there would be to this sort of problem, but I'm also convinced that the bulk of the youth "vote" should kind of shut up about feeling alienated, since it abdicated its own responsibility and brought it on itself (and, by extension, the rest of us, by creating an environment where Harper can score repeated electoral victories). I'm reasonably lucky, living in a part of the country where individual votes demonstrably matter with razor-thin margins a lot of the time, but I also know this place isn't unique and that some vastly higher number - oh, I'll be generous, say a third of them - could start really frightening the Conservatives if people just started marking a little X or writing a letter now and then. The participation's tiny enough that even a few percent would be a big jump in the voting bloc.

Yeah. I have no idea what to do about it, or even what to think about it that runs in more complex directions than "argh! you stupid stupid fuckers! !" Soooo, I did the Modern World thing and ranted into the intertubes about it. ;P