Many of these cultural gestures are manifesting themselves globally, abetted by technological improvements and an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure that enhances individuals’ abilities to participate in countless overlapping communication networks. But are Americans perhaps more bombarded with ballot initiatives than others? And if so, could it be because they prefer it?
In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two writers from the Economist deconstruct
This demonstrates a strange paradox in American attitudes toward participation in voting in general. We/they seem to like the idea of voting, judging by the increasing options the private market is offering to “rock the vote” in one way, shape or form. But we often shy away from elections that directly pertain to governance. Perhaps Micklethwait and Wooldridge are on to something when they say Americans are nervous about handing power over to representatives, even if their explanation—we like ballot initiatives more than just about anywhere else—deserves greater elaboration than they provide. Most states allow some form of referrals of the state legislature to the people on major legislative acts (such as amendments to the constitutions), nearly half allow ballot initiatives of some form, and various municipal governments across the country actively integrate referenda into major elections. By some arguments, an over-reliance on ballot initiatives only serves to undermine the trust we might otherwise instill in our public servants, and other countries demonstrate far greater faith by eschewing referenda that their representatives are going to serve their elected roles responsibly. Like any remotely complicated causal nexus, the chicken and the egg apply here: no doubt most Americans who support direct democracy do so precisely because of lack of confidence in elected leadership. Such disillusionment may also justify low participation levels in major elections: a bifurcated electorate manifests this disdain for representative democracy by either overriding officials’ authority through direct ballot initiatives or non-participation in the voting process altogether.
I’m scarcely going to sneer that voter turnout has been higher for final episodes of American Idol than it is for presidential elections; enough other cultural critics on the blogosphere are doing so and I don’t feel it’s a particularly productive polemic. No amount of railing against “what this says about our society” is going to change the fact that a nation of widely divergent values and traditions is unlikely to find much of anything under which it can so easily organize or mobilize. That more people have direct, convenient access to televisions, telephones, and the Internet than to polling stations (including the millions who cannot legally vote) is only one factor of many.
So, rather than dwelling on problematic voter turnout for “the big ones” (whether that be Barack Obama or Adam Lambert), I’ll again focus on the more ordinary examples of ballot initiatives scattered across this great land—an ordinariness suitable of a website called American Dirt, like this example at a rest area near a scenic lookout point of a canyon on an infrequently-traveled state highway just west of Taos, New Mexico:
I guess the voting buttons to the right of the sign indicate the users’ feelings regarding the care and cleanliness of these restrooms; I could hardly have been a judge, since, as is obvious, the door to the restrooms was padlocked shut. It was about
This sign suggests to me that the State of New Mexico is operating much the same fashion as various polls conducted by Newsmax and other agencies choking the vacant add space across the web—they both are fixated on the essence of empowerment that voting proffers upon the people, rather than the actuality. It seems all the more pessimistic when a state entity that actually has the power to initiate legally binding elections still resorts to this vague “polling” at an unmanned station—the governmental equivalent to waving a butterfly net around. In an era where shrinking state budgets are resulting in massive closures of rest areas across the country, couldn’t an unconfident legislature submit a ballot to the constituents of New Mexico if they really wanted an accurate gauge of the efficacy and popularity of rest areas? Couldn’t a careful monitoring of the use of paper towels or water from toilet flushes determine whether or not the rest area was deemed acceptable enough that people are using it? In a sparsely populated state such as New Mexico, truck stops and fast food chains are few and far between, posing less competition to rest areas than they might in, say, Ohio, so their continued operation could prove a more pressing concern. But if I were a taxpayer in New Mexico who was vexed that the state couldn’t properly maintain its rest areas, I most likely could voice my frustration by pressing the “No” button fifty times in succession. Or perhaps I might just be annoyed that the state was spending money on something I thought frivolous—and then not even granting me access.