Is Voter Apathy the Greatest Threat to Irish and American Democracy?
As published in the Western People, 10 December 2024
Colton Starley (www.jackcentral.org/opinion/taking-a-stand-does-not-voting-mean-you-don-t-care/article_9a7bb3a6-8aae-11e6-b2f4-dbf868bbd668.html)
Art O’Leary, the chief executive of the Independent Electoral Commission has just publicly admitted that the Irish Electoral Register could be inflated by as much as 500,000 names through duplication or through not removing people who have died. Thus, he warned that the disappointing official turnout of 59.7 per cent in the recent national election was ‘a very blunt measure by which to judge the performance...or the engagement of people generally with democracy’. More worryingly, Mr O’Leary did not mention those who had emigrated out of the state (such as yours truly) but are still on the register. He also noted that no-one should expect it to be fixed any time soon, adding helpfully ‘I don't know if that figure is correct or not, but it sounds to me as if it's about right’. When challenged that voter fraud was now more likely as a result, Mr O’Leary’s conclusion was hardly a resounding reassurance, ‘if it happens then it is probably immaterial, I suspect. But like I said, we have no evidence of that.[1] In short, Art doesn’t know and is guessing, but it really doesn’t matter too much, so don’t hold him to any of it, please.
So according to Art, the official Irish electorate of 3,689,896 should be closer to 3.2 million, meaning the turnout of 2,218,295 could have been closer to 70 per cent, throwing the post-election discussion by a conveyor-belt of media pundits, about the apathy of the Irish electorate, into the air. While a 15 per cent of overstated registered voter numbers may seem shocking, in fairness the Electoral Commission itself was only established in February 2023 and tasked with the responsibility for the oversight of all elections in Ireland, including electoral operations, constituency reviews and electoral integrity.[2] In a country where the state has overseen projects with world-record overruns in budgets and timescales, we may expect the Irish electoral register to be within tolerable accuracy by Irish unification — so long as the present bureaucrats are in charge of that timetable also.
4,165,000 people in Ireland are aged 18 and over and potentially eligible to register to vote — subject to citizenship and residency requirements and based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations as I was waiting for the final Mayo count from Castlebar count centre last Sunday. Thus, our actual voting-eligible population turnout rate may be only around 53 per cent. While a rough estimate, this compares very poorly with almost all the states in the recent US presidential election, tied second-to-last with Arkansas and Oklahoma – where republican dominance of all branches of government renders voting incentives almost irrelevant.[3] It also may explain why so few voted for the opposition to the present Fine Gael-Fianna Fail government (the Green party collapse aside) during a calamitous housing crisis, high cost-of-living and slew of scandals of state-sponsored project overruns.
Thus, while the head of the independent Electoral Commission suggests that Irish democracy is much better health than voting statistics suggest, the truth may indicate a greater apathy among people towards any of the candidates standing, who simply did not bother to register in the first place.
The voter rolls in various US states are in similar flux and attempts by Electronic Registration Information Center to allow for the inter-state sharing of voter registration information has been undermined by right-wing conspiracy attacks and nefarious republican grandstanding. Established in 2012 by 7 states, ERIC is a non-profit, bipartisan consortium that allows its members to identify duplicate and incorrect voter registrations that ought to be removed from voter lists, including those who have moved out of state. Not long ago, ERIC claimed 32 states as members, including Republican-led states like Florida, Ohio and Missouri. However, recently Republicans have found it politically advantageous to use the idea of inaccurate voter rolls as a proxy for insinuating fraud by Democrats, rather than undertake genuine reform and thus many red states subsequently withdrew. Take for instance Ohio Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, who called ERIC ‘one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have’, before doing a 180 degree turn and pushing his state to withdraw a month later. Thus, the periodic removal of thousands of voters from the register in such Republican states as Texas and Florida and the passing of ever more restrictive voter laws there is more about suppressing the Democrat supporting electorate than ensuring the dead or illegal can’t vote.[4]
Post-election pundits and media personalities have tried to make much of the final election results with many Democrats now seeing some small victory in Donald Trump failing to get over 50 per cent of the popular vote and only beating his opponent Kamala Harris by 49.76 to 48.21 per cent. But the fact is that there is little individual incentive for people to cast votes in deeply partisan states such as California and Texas, knowing their state outcome is not going to affect who becomes president (in fact Texas only had a 56.57 per cent turnout of the voting-eligible population). Thus, we cannot know how much support either candidate would receive in a ‘normal’ popular presidential election as held in almost all other democracies.[5]
In short, both Ireland and the USA have serious issues with ensuring full participation of their respective voting-eligible populations, in the most foundational democratic right and responsibility of choosing their representative government. In the US, one party is now wedded to the pretence of fighting election fraud to dampen the franchise in their favour, while neither Democrats nor Republicans will get rid of the farce of the electoral college and the fact that only seven ‘swing states’ effectively decide the election. In Ireland, the laid-back, nonchalant official (non)regard towards ensuring accuracy in the voter registers suits the omnipresent Fine Gael and Fianna Fail incumbents. Why bother do anything properly when the system already works out so well in your favour? No point in fixing something that’s broke, especially when a healthy, dynamic Irish democracy based on grass-roots participation and decentralised decision-making could return a very different government. For different reasons, both countries ignore the growing apathy to voting at their peril.
[1] https://www.rte.ie/news/election-24/2024/1203/1484435-electoral-register/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Irish_general_election
[3] https://election.lab.ufl.edu/2024-general-election-turnout/
[4] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/accurate-voter-rolls-vs-conspiracy-who-win-trevor-potter; https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790319853/are-states-purging-or-cleaning-voter-registration-rolls
[5] https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/