George Jonas: “When few people bother to vote, it may not be due to their alienation or civic disengagement. It may be due to their confidence that any one of the political parties and persons seeking their mandate can do the job. In contrast, when voters consider that times are hard or ominous; when they regard one or more of the contending parties as menacing, and when they think that their choice of government might vitally affect their essential interests, few are likely to stay home on election day.”
I'm in in the unusual position of agreeing with Preston "Refoooorrrm" Manning, who in a speech “made it clear, though, that he considered voting virtuous.” (New political slogan: "Voting is Virtuous!") This article illustrates one of the reasons I like the media outlets like The National Post and Slate. A lot of their columns have a similar theme: either "What you think is bad is in fact good" or "What you think is good is in fact bad."
Totally unrelated: the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly, as I found out last night, is unfathomably good. Even the letters to the editor (with replies from the authors of the articles the letter-writers were referring to) rocked my world.
Comments
I don't think that the nature of the candidates has that much to do with voter turnout. We can look to the French elections over the summer as an example: voter turnout was low and Le Pen passed through to the second stage of the elections, much to the dismay of the majority of the French people. Of course *then* they mobilized their otherwise docile non-voting public to ensure that Chirac one when it counted, but still... Le Pen was obviously a force to be reckoned with in the first stage of elections and that didn't draw a significant amount of the otherwise non-voting public to the polls.
I do think that low voter turnout isn't such a bad thing, though. In theory, those people that do vote then are going to be the ones with more of an interest in politics and more firmly held political opinions--ones that weren't formed because candidate X had the best TV commercials. Of course, this doesn't turn out to be true (for the most part) in the States, as age seems to be a very important factor in voter turnout and thus the voice of an increasingly old subset of the population is heard the loudest. But, in theory... :)