Status Quo Problems

Status quo Problems American voter turnout needs a solution as current methods have not alleviated its decline. Jonathan Levine is a lecturer of American Studies and English at Tsinghua University in Beijing, November 2, 2012, "The Case for Compulsory Voting," http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/thecase-compulsory-voting-7691 (accessed 8/15/13) The last time Americans went to the polls to pick a president, Barack Obama handily defeated his Republican challenger, John McCain, by a 53 to 46 percent vote margin. The president’s unambiguous victory, however, was marred by a troubling statistic: 43 percent of the American voting population— about ninety-seven million people—decided to stay home, a trend that has been more or less consistent since 1970. Turnout at midterm elections is even more unsettling. For more than fifty years, no midterm contest has ever garnered a majority of the voting-age American public. Given the numbers, it’s nothing short of miraculous that there has not been a widespread loss of legitimacy among our elected officials. With the 2012 election only weeks away, and the candidates’ bases largely underwhelmed, America seems on track to continue down the path of electoral apathy. “But what can we do?” say the pundits. “This is America. Don’t we have a right to stay home if we choose? How can it be right for the government to force you into an activity as prosaic as voting?” These and other well-worn criticisms have more or less settled the debate and snuffed out any serious public discussion about the consequences of mass electoral disengagement. The counterarguments, however, are not so Orwellian. True election reform would create a more representative and democratic system.

Reduced Turnout erodes the legitimacy of government, which could be dangerous for the U.S. Sofie Marien, senior member of the PARTIREP project and a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the University of Leuven, October 2007, "Is Compulsory Voting a Good Idea? The Consequences of Compulsory Voting in Belgium," Participation and Representation (PARTIREP), pp. 1-12, http://www.partirep.eu/sites/default/files/working_paper/document/1273756118.pdf (accessed 8/15/13) A turnout rate of 53 per cent is not exceptional in American politics (Federal Election Commission 2005). For all the parliamentary elections from 1945 till 2001 the average turnout rate in the United States amounted to 47.7 per cent of the voting age population. As a consequence the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Pintor and Gratschew 2002) ranked the United States at the 138th place of 169 countries with regard to turnout. The problem may worsen because voter participation is declining in most liberal democracies (Franklin 2004). The fact that more and more citizens decide not to vote can now be considered as a serious problem for the health of American democracy (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995; Franklin 1999), since low turnout erodes the

legitimacy of government. After all, what authority does a president or an institution have if elected by only half of the voting age population?