Low voter turnout raises questions on U.S. democracy

Many commentators are drawing far-reaching political and policy conclusions from the recent United States off-year elections. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has resigned, while U.S. President Bill Clinton appears somewhat more secure. But what about the substance of the election itself? Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin takes a close look at one fundamental flaw in the way Americans practice democracy.

HONG KONG (JP): Believe it or not, when it comes to the democratic duty of every citizen to turn out and vote, even Hong Kong puts the United States to shame, let alone all other Asian nations in which real elections are held.

Of course, on Nov. 3, American voters had the chance to vote for bodies -- the whole of the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate and a large number of state governors -- all of whom possess real power to initiate and pass legislation or to restrict or reject policies of the incumbent administration.

Hong Kong's Legislative Council, and several Asian rubber- stamp one-party parliaments, are tame institutions by comparison. Yet even Hong Kong achieved a 53 percent level of voter turnout this year, while comparable figures in other Asian democracies range between 60 percent and 80 percent.

All are doing far better than the United States, the nation which likes to see itself as the Middle Kingdom of Democracy.

Given this understandable self-perception as the democratic center of the world, the United States gives itself the right, whenever elections are held anywhere on earth, to send delegations around the globe to pronounce on the presence, or on the lack of democratic virtue in the electoral process.

When Indonesia finally organizes its next general election, American officials or nonofficials are certain to scout the scene. But, as far as I know, there were no Indonesian delegations inspecting the recent U.S. trip to the hustings.

The dispatching of American (and other foreign) observers to monitor elections is acceptable, even desirable -- provided it is a two-way process.

What was missing this past week -- and it will probably continue to be missing for a few more years yet -- was a long overdue Asian sense of equality. Earlier this year I introduced The Jakarta Post readers to my Indonesian friend Supomo, who derided the Australian -- and Western -- tendency to treat Asians as if they were poodles in need of being patted. But the converse of such Western condescension is undue Asian deference toward the West.

Because of that deference, no Asian government or NGO sent an official delegation of observers to the United States last week to observe and pronounce on the grave weaknesses now observable in the American democratic process. In a nutshell, voter turnout levels in the United States are appalling and have been getting worse over the last three decades.

The American and foreign media inevitably rush in to explain the election results, sometimes as soon as exit polls are available, without stopping to ask some key questions: how many people are actually exiting? How many voters bothered to exercise their right to vote?

Prolonged paeans of punditry are produced interpreting what the American people think, on the basis of the election results, with only a very few commentators stopping to point out that the results, at best, reflect the views of a minority, possibly a tiny one.

Because of the abject voter turnout rates, in the United States the silent majority is, in fact, just that. It is a pity that a few Asian -- and other foreign -- voices are not raised to point this out. If the Middle Kingdom of Democracy is to fulfill its rightful role, then it really should get the beam out of its own eye, before it spotlights the mote in nearly every other nation's democratic practices.

The problems start with the act of registration. Unlike Australia, the act of registering your right to vote in the United States is not compulsory. Unlike Britain and other European countries, compilation of the voter rolls is not administratively almost automatic. Unlike Hong Kong, the U.S. federal and state governments do not send officials around seeking to expand the list of voters. Voter registration drives are left to the two main political parties who go about that task intermittently.

The net result is that the United States is a very incomplete democracy, in the crucial aspect of voter participation, and has been for a long time now.

Voter turnout is often misleadingly measured against voter registration, not against the total of legally eligible voters. Thus in times past only 50 percent of all Americans who were entitled to vote actually registered. The voter turnout was sometimes about 50 percent. But that was 50 percent of those who registered. In reality, that actually meant that only about 25 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. Only a quarter of all Americans chose the leader of the free world.

Since then, voter registration has improved a bit, though not by much. According to the Committee for The Study of the American Electorate (CSAE), which plows a lonely furrow trying to remind Americans of their basic democratic failures, the number of eligible voters is about 180 million once deductions have been made for resident aliens, illegal immigrants and convicted felons, none of whom are entitled to vote.

The percentage of the voting-age population which has bothered to register has now increased to 60 percent or about 110 million. When Americans register, they have to indicate their party preference. Democrats still lead over the Republicans, according to the latest CSAE findings, by 34 to 25.5 percent. But as a measure of the electorate's disillusion with both parties, a factor which affects turnout, those registering on behalf of other parties or as independents are climbing fast -- no less than 13.5 percent in 1998.

The latest most detailed findings relate to the primary votes prior to this year's elections.

Theoretically primary voting, in which voters choose which candidates they want to see contesting the general election, should be the glory of American democracy. In nearly all Asian and European democracies, political parties decide the candidates. But what is actually happening in American primary elections is a travesty of what was intended. This year, the turnout in the primary elections was only 17.5 percent of eligible voters. A tiny minority of voters (9 percent of Democrats, 7 percent of Republicans) decided on behalf of the absent majority.

These totally abject turnouts gave rise to expectations that the turnout in the general election on Nov. 3 would also be the lowest ever. This did not happen. But this does not mean that Americans have any cause for self-congratulation.

Voter turnout, generally estimated at between 37 percent and 38 percent, hovered around the same miserably low level that has characterized off-year elections for the last two decades, between 37 percent and 40 percent. But whether this is 40 percent of eligible voters, or merely 40 percent of the 60 percent who are registered is not always clear.

One estimate of voter turnout as against voting age population has put the figure at a miserable 33 percent.

Another said 35 percent. Another source says that 49 percent of those who registered actually voted -- which would mean that only about 29 percent of voting-age Americans bothered to exercise their right to do so.

CSAE will no doubt produce definitive statistics in due course but already the overall pattern is clear: America is and remains a minority democracy, further removed from Abraham Lincoln's "more perfect union" than it should ever be.