To vote or not to vote. Is this democracy?
In recent years, I often found myself wondering: “Do I vote, or not? Who shall I pick when I don’t like any of the candidates?”
Casting one’s own vote is a cornerstone of democracies, a right as well as a duty for all citizens. In some countries, like Belgium, it is compulsory. But it always freaked me out to feel the pressure of voting when none of the candidates, lists or programmes are fully satisfactory to me. “Vote for the least bad”, some friends told me. “Vote for X, so that Y cannot govern”, told me other friends.
These logics do not appeal to me. I wish I could find a white box, clearly marked “None of the above”. Shouldn’t this be a right of the voters too?
Making a choice is a responsibility not to be taken lightly. Before voting, the responsible citizen shall seek all the information that will help him/her to make the correct decision, to defend his/her own rights and benefits, to choose the representative whose ideas are the closest to…. OK, OK. The theory works, but in practice it is not easy to find reliable information. Politicians often lie and mislead the voters. I’m not talking only about “politician’s promises” (as people say in Italy), but outright lies. The pro-Brexit campaign, for instance, has been based on lies admitted by the same leaders of the campaign after the win. The “alternative facts” cited by Trump’s presidential entourage have made headlines all over the world. People that believe in something, will always find on the internet the right “information”, data and articles supporting their ides, thus creating self-sustained thought-rooms from which it is very hard to escape.
Sometimes we are called to decide on very delicate and technical matters. I was too young to vote at the 1987 referendum in Italy, calling on people to decide if Italy should continue the nuclear energy program or not. It was less than one year after the Chernobyl disaster that dispersed radiation all over Europe, so the result was massively in favour of stopping this activity. Many years later, as a student of physics at the University in Pisa, I co-founded an eco-friendly association. The first action we took was to organise a conference to discuss the nuclear energy in Italy. We invited two renown nuclear physicists, and a few politicians, among which the promoters of the 1987 referendum. They all responded enthusiastically to our proposal, confirming their presence within days. But, when we told the politicians that two nuclear physicists were to be on the panel, all the politicians we invited stepped down, invoking unlikely excuses. One of them mentioned electoral engagements in Molise (the second tiniest region of Italy) when no elections were scheduled in the following year. In dismal, we had to cancel the event.
My main motivation to organise the conference was to better understand nuclear energy, and have an informed opinion on its usefulness and cleanliness. I got no answer to that, but a new question: can we really decide about such delicate matters via a vote? When not even the promoters of the referendum seem confident enough to face an expert?
Democracy, as implemented in the western political systems, is not perfect. No political system is perfect. The right of vote is not the only power we hold in our hands, as I realised that continuing to question any system is essential for it to work at its best. Maybe, today, politicians and decisions makers should accept liability for the decisions they take and the actions they promote. To quote from a friend of mine, justice may be the key for democracy to thrive and survive.
