Essay: WHAT IF YOU DON’T VOTE?

IRONICALLY, America was the first nation to proclaim officially that rulers may govern only with the people’s consent. In Britain, Denmark, Italy and West Germany, more than 75% of all eligible voters consistently turn out for national elections. In this century, U.S. voter participation has gone from a low of 44.2% in 1920 to a high of only 63.8% in 1960.

The U.S. nonvoting phenomenon is especially troubling in 1968. According to some analysts, Americans are so disenchanted with the major candidates that millions may skip the election. Not that anyone really knows. Other observers suggest that nonvoters may be far outnumbered by people who ignored previous elections—and will now vote for George Wallace.

All the same, everyone knows someone who toys with the idea of staying home. In California, for example, voter registration has dropped by more than 1,000,000 since 1964, while the population has risen by 1,500,000. Across the country, the abstainers are mainly disaffected McCarthy and Kennedy Democrats, plus some Rockefeller Republicans. If they agree with George Wallace on nothing else, many still feel that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between Nixon and Humphrey.

Negroes are especially disillusioned. Though Southern blacks are now rousing themselves for Humphrey, Northern Negroes are holding back. “I’ve never heard so much cynicism about an election,” says Nathan Wright, a leading organizer and observer of black militants. “Some are, perhaps, even cynical enough to vote for Wallace, on the theory that if this is what white America wants, let’s help the issue come to the top.” That may be an extreme possibility, but, as always, it is hard to say who speaks for U.S. Negroes. Moderates tend to agree with Whitney Young: “White liberals can indulge the privilege of not voting, but blacks can’t. This is a crucial election.”

Ambiguous Exile

The dilemma of the nonvoters is suggested by Eugene McCarthy’s awkward behavior these days. After the Democratic convention, he declared in Biblical tones: “We will proceed as a Government in exile, and as a people in exile.” The result has certainly been confusing. In New York, McCarthy joined a successful lawsuit to have his name removed from the ballot, thus preserving Humphrey’s slim chance to win the state’s 43 electoral votes. Yet, in campaigning for antiwar congression?! candidates in California, McCarthy has done nothing to discourage a massive write-in vote for himself. In California, this could cost Humphrey 400,000 popular votes and throw the state’s 40 electoral votes to Nixon.

With strange ambiguity, McCarthy has also endorsed Edmund Muskie for Vice President while leaving out Hubert Humphrey. Since a vote for Muskie is recorded as a vote for Humphrey, McCarthy is either kidding or indirectly supporting Humphrey. In fact, he may yet endorse the Vice President before the election. Numerous Democratic dissidents, including California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh and Historian Arthur Schlesinger, have already followed that path. Many others, however, are resolutely unreconciled. For the first time since it began endorsing candidates in 1932, The New Republic refused to make any choice. Novelist Mary McCarthy writes bitterly: “Far from being a sign of apathy, [not voting] points to an aroused nation, resentful of the insult offered to the intelligence by the Humphrey-Nixon alternative handed to the public like a stacked deck of cards.”

Foes of the Viet Nam war bitterly remember the 1964 election in which many voted for Johnson because he promised peace, even though they had reservations about him in other respects. As they see it, Johnson went on to adopt Barry Goldwater’s war policies. This time, they see no significant differences between the candidates on Viet Nam. To register a moral protest, many war dissenters plan to boycott the polls entirely on the theory that a huge nonvote will somehow shock the new Ad ministration, or at least free dissenters from complicity in electing Nixon or Humphrey, both of whom vaguely promise only “an honorable peace.”

Other dissidents will get their dissatisfaction on the books by writing in Eugene McCarthy, Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver or Comedian Pat Paulsen. Another tactic is to vote only for congressional and gubernatorial candidates who reflect dissenting views. Among anti-Humphrey Democrats, the hope is that all this will help speed old-line party leaders out of power and permit insurgents to take over by 1972.

The national malaise poses a civic puzzle: Are Americans obliged to vote, even for candidates they dislike? Purists have sometimes overstated a yes answer. Dictatorships often force people to vote for handpicked candidates and then proudly proclaim that participation hit 95% or more. By contrast, the U.S. right to vote carries with it a right not to vote, to register a negative protest, and most Americans would balk at hav ing it any other way. Even so, they sometimes forget that people the world over have often died fighting for even the crudest kind of franchise. Well aware of that struggle, some democracies impose fines on nonvoters. 2% for 98%

Freedom from any such pressure has blinded the nonvoters to a key point. A leader can shape the country’s moral choices by taking a no-compromise stand on a great issue, such as the Viet Nam war. Both McCarthy and Lyndon Johnson did just that, risking their political careers in the process. But voters have a different role: to convey their positions through the ballot, the most effective weapon they have. A conscientious citizen can hardly pass off that role easily. Surely the U.S. right not to vote, or to write in sure losers, also carries with it a duty to weigh the consequences, to consider the axiom that inaction is a form of action. A single vote for President is so minuscule among millions that hectoring any individual to vote may seem futile. But is it?

In 1839, Marcus Morton was elected Governor of Massachusetts by one vote out of 102,066. In the 1916 presidential election, Charles Evans Hughes seemed a certain winner until returns from California two days later gave Woodrow Wilson the state by some 4,000 votes out of the nearly 1,000,000 cast. Less than one vote per precinct could have swung the election to Hughes. In 1960, John Kennedy beat Nixon by only 112,803 popular votes out of 68.8 million. Less than one vote per precinct would have given Nixon a popular victory.

The 1968 election now promises to be extremely close in many states with sizable electoral votes, including Massachusetts (14), Michigan (21), Minnesota (10), Ohio (26), Pennsylvania (29) and Texas (25). The candidate who wins any of those states by only one popular vote will take all of the state’s electoral votes in the Electoral College, where a 270-vote majority will make him President. As Wallace keeps telling his supporters: “All we need is a popular plurality in this state—34%.”

For all its symbolism, a U.S. presidential election is not a contest between good and evil, a referendum on war, or a race between philosopher-kings that dissidents can safely ignore because party leaders have rejected the loftiest candidates. Viewing the election in such terms is no more realistic than the dreams of McCarthyites who expect to take over the Democratic Party after Humphrey loses. That hope is likely to be foiled by party professionals who, unlike the McCarthy amateurs, work at politics full time; much the same happened on the Republican side, when the pros shut out the Rockefeller forces who refused to support Goldwater in 1964. Equally unrealistic is the dissident-Democrat hope that a President Nixon could easily be defeated for reelection in 1972.

The fact is that Americans are rarely presented with ideal presidential candidates. The very nature of party politics dictates compromise candidates, and the voter can do no more—or less-than to choose at the time he is given a choice. Perhaps unfairly, many voters regard the alternatives in 1968 as a choice between the lesser of two (or three) evils. Even so, making a choice is imperative; obviously if one rejects a lesser evil, the greater may prevail. Thus the nonvoter is morally just as responsible for the result as if he had voted for the candidate he abhors. Edmund Burke put it well: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Actually, the voter’s dilemma tends to be exaggerated by the current hunger for a presidential hero, an exciting idealist (or at least simplifier), who could strip down the era’s complexities and articulate a national vision. What frustrated voters may overlook is the fact that great Presidents have generally been more pragmatic than idealistic. Lincoln stayed aloof from the moral absolutes of the abolitionists—and he, not they, abolished slavery. In this sense, an undecided voter might well focus on the candidate who seems most capable of putting together a viable political coalition, working with Congress, mobilizing interest groups and making the country move.

Neither Nixon nor Humphrey looks very much like a presidential hero, yet both do offer a clear choice between styles and temperaments—a significant choice in itself—plus more experience for the White House than dozens of candidates before them. Voters who still yawn might consider that 1) any sizable nonvote could deprive the winner of the clear mandate that he will need to govern effectively; and 2) George Wallace is contending for a job that gives to one man global power over nuclear life and death.

Not vote in 1968? Millions of foreigners would gladly take any nonvoting American’s place at the polls. A mere 2% of the world’s population is about to elect a President whose every move can deeply affect the other 98%. If that fact imposes no moral duty on Americans to vote, and vote wisely, what does?