Elinor Mosher wrote:
>
> Mr. Lunde has asked the question: Why do the poor not vote? Pollsters have said that
>it is because they feel it is futile. They believe that their vote will not make any
>difference.
>
> In a little book he published two or three years ago, The Good Society, J.K.
>Galbraith
> begged and cajoled for that very thing. (He also back in the '50's warned of the
>problem of overproduction.)
As a short answer, this is largely true. But there are other important
elements involved.
At various times, the poor (particularly the working poor) have had a
larger degree of participation in voting. One thinks of this
particularly in the U.S., and, if memory serves correctly (relative to
previous levels of voting, rather than to an ideal level): in the 1820's
and 1830's (when Jacksonian party organization emerged, in areas where
elections were opened up and the elecorate expanded; in the 1930's and
1940's, when the Democratic Party under Roosevelt allied with the
emerigng industrial union movement; and in some states in the 1960's,
where blacks were mobilized for civil rights and to qualify as voters).
In each of these cases, organizations emerged whose interest/ideology
involved regular work to create a mass electorate (with or without
corrupt practices involving some phantom voters). The poor were not
left to their own resources. The American practice of registering
voters on a voluntary (rather than a universal) basis, from election to
election, created an impetus to go out and work with the poor (and
others) to create a larger active voting mass. In some cases, where
there were artificial barriers to voting, governments were lobbied (e.g.
lobbying of the U.S. Federal government to put pressure on states to
reform their voting laws), lawyers volunteered services in taking cases
to court, and young people helped train poor people to pass basic
literacy and civics tests (this leaves out the fact that some states
artificially raised what was required in a civics test to make it very
complex for poor people or blacks, and relatively easy for people with
more income and/or white). The general point is that the question of
whether people voted was not left up to the individual to decide,
including taking on big burdens to exercise civil rights. People went
ot work to broaden the actual electorate and, while this was not by any
means a perfect system, this waas often linked to some measure of group
politics to ameliorate the condition of the poor and/or implement
measures that tried to help them fight for their interests.
I think there are at least four areas that should be considered relative
to a decline (apparently) of such activity in North America in recent
decades:
(1) Up till recently, political causes have splintered into a great
many worthy, but competing groups, each of which is making claims on
volunteer workers. This is a part of the shift that occurred from
socio-economic politics to cultural politics, seeking the advance in the
rights of self-defining communities (the various "liberation" groups).
As part of this process, oppressed groups could occur within the middle
classes and to some extent people were drawn into such groups, suiting
their own itnerests and perceptions, and away from a general struggle
oriented to working with, and in suppport of, the poor and their rights.
(2) Poverty was seen as a complex issue, more than as an issue of
economics and policy, and increasingly (in the 1970's and 1980's) there
was a tendency to "blame the victim" and to believe that the poor should
essentially "do it for themselves."
(3) Some reforms, or changes, or differences from the American system
essentially moved to a system of automatic registration of voters, thus
creating a large, potential electorate and reduction of the level of
interaction from election to election. Thus the Canadian system, which
never had the registration imperative in and within political parties,
has moved to an almost completely automatic system.
(4) Working elections now involves much more use of media and less door
to door canvassing. The first elections I was aware of were in the
North End of Winnipeg, in the 1940's. The old CCF socialist party tried
to enlist just about everyone it could find (including non-voting
high-school kids) and did very thorough canvasing of the
constituencies. The rule of thumb was to canvas 3 times during the
election and, if possible, to engage people in conversation and feed
back information to more responsible and experienced people in the
organization. Polls were few and far between, and, not only the CCF, but
other parties as well, had little access or funds for media (the CBC's
free political broadcasts were a godsend). Now, use of media in
elections has expanded greatly and reformed campaign financing provides
matching public funds that enables much more use of media to take place,
even for the NDP. (From time to time, the NDP -- in terms of declared
campaign funds -- managed to have more official funds at its disposal,
e.g. in the late Mulroney period, than the other parties, so I
understand.) There is a certain distancing from the individual
constituent in this media-dependent era and a greater reliance on mass
messages and relatively spotty coverage of voters. A general rule of
thumb is that, in many areas, the poor will get less personal contact
from candidates, campaignkers, and pollsters than the population as a
whole. This is an accepted truism (as Elinor MOsher pointed out) --
i.e., the poor are disillusioned, and don't vote, therefore there is no
percentage in approaching them. But the avoidance of the poor
(compounded by the overall reliance on media for coverage of the
population) is in fact a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, as was noted
in post-election studies of the U.S. 1948 polling debacle: door-to-door
pollsters tended to skew their samples by staying out of neighborhoods
that were unpleasant or perceived as dangerous (or strange).
I don't pretend that these comments are scientific or definitive. But I
think that they offer at least some additional insights into some of the
problems. I guess, speaking from my heart and not from my memory of
what people have said about this, I think we kind of help create the
poor that we want: we want a population that is invisible, that we don't
have to reach out for, that doesn't get our attention, that enables us
to support only those good causes that we can work up righteous
indignation because the people are easily like us (in our own special
peculiarities and cultures), while the poor are remote, intractactable,
unreachable. I think that the corrolary to "Why don't the poor vote?"
should be the question "Who is standing up with the poor? What can they
do to help the poor mobilize and vote? What can they do to help make
the votes of the poor count?"
Saul Silverman
