I have an embarrassing failure to admit. I live with a person who refuses to vote, and not only have I not yet managed to change his mind, but I very sincerely doubt that I ever will. This is embarrassing to me as a proponent of voting, as someone with respect for civic duties, as a general fan of getting to cast a vote (I am eligible in three different countries!), as a supporter of democracy, as someone who prides themselves on being good at arguing and wearing someone down until they finally just agree to shut me up, and as a very stubborn person. In short, it hurts.
Canadian election day having just passed and AV/devolved/local election day being just around the corner, my Facebook and Twitter feeds are currently flush with "GO AND VOTE" or "Did you vote?" or "If you didn't vote you can't complain" or "If you didn't vote you're an idiot" or "I didn't vote and I'm proud of it" or, you know, general voting discussion. First of all, I was actually really proud that my Facebook feed showed more posts about getting out and voting yesterday than it did about Osama bin Laden. But more to the point, these get out and vote posts and their equivalent variations, while well-meaning, almost always fail to properly address why a large segment of the population doesn't vote.
People assume that young people don't vote because they're apathetic and lazy, because they don't know anything about politics and have no interest in learning, and because they haven't been properly educated about their civic duty. So the solution is: bully/guilt them out of apathy online, have politicians pander to them in campaigns, make hip video ads to interest them, and add another helping of guilt on the civic duty front. But these are unbelievably superficial solutions that don't even begin to address the real reasons many young people don't vote.
The general underlying feeling is this: politicians are living in another world. They don't know about the problems that real people face and, what's more, they don't care to know. When they try to pander to young people, it's always a) incredibly obvious and forced, b) ineffective, and c) seemingly more pointed at parents, anyway. Part of it may be a chicken and egg thing - politicians know young people don't vote, so why bother trying to appeal to them, and what danger if you don't? At any rate, people who feel this way tend to feel this way about all politicians -Nick Clegg and Jack Layton are no different than David Cameron and Stephen Harper, really. The ones who say they're different will prove themselves when they get into power, and frankly, Clegg hasn't helped on this front. All politicians are, in their eyes, the same, only interested in sloganeering and mudslinging and not in discussing why it seems that some people get it way easier by being on the dole than people who have to work for a living, and why caps on non-EU skilled workers won't do anything to help the over-crowded employment markets for the working class.
The young people who are coming up in political parties and who are supposed to be out there encouraging their fellow youth to vote don't usually help. Anyone who is trying to make a career in politics tends to make the very early mistake of becoming a party hack who refuses to have any opinion that isn't the party opinion, and to start using their Facebook or Twitter to attack opposition parties. I guess this shows their staunch support for the party and will help them in their quest to move on up. But it endears them to no one. It shows that there is no fundamental shift coming, that politics will not change and will always be politics as usual, with people more interested in advancing their own success than in actually learning what matters to those people who feel completely left out of the process and completely disaffected with politics. These young advocates are moulding themselves to become the next generation of out of touch leaders who still can't bring themselves to discuss real issues.
And what do I say to that? I tried to convince him to vote in the upcoming referendum, thinking I could point to it as a way toward change, the possibility for getting new voices heard. 'Oh, you mean like the Lib Dems would have done better under AV? And for what? Nick Clegg turned out to be the same as the rest of them.'
My 20-year-old brother cast his first ballot yesterday. He told me that he was voting for one party because he didn't hate the leader like he did the other parties, and that he probably wouldn't bother at all except that he felt it was his civic duty (thanks, Ontario, and your mandatory civics classes!). This election, with the NDP's surge, is seen by a lot of people as an opportunity for something new, albeit as opposition. But the NDP has benefited from being a third party that was almost a joke for a long time; their policies have never had to be entirely realistic because they were never going to have to implement them. I'm afraid that if the NDP move toward the centre, as I think they'd pretty much have to do to make some of their policies viable, people will become disillusioned with what this new wave produced, the way they did with the Lib Dems here (though of course the Lib Dems are part of the governing coalition, which makes a massive difference).
I don't know how long civic duty will hold people like my brother, who are already fairly disaffected on their first vote, if there is no fundamental shift in the way politics is done to show people that their vote does matter a bit more than just replacing one thing with more of the same. And I don't know how anything other than a fundamental shift could possibly win over people like my boyfriend, who feel so removed from the political system as to be vehemently against participating in it. People need to feel that MPs and party leaders are something other than just professional politicians who are only interested in how much power they can grab and how bad they can make each other look.
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