Unknown voters – Unknown non-voters
By Joanna Socha
Had I ever thought about non-voters before? Probably not. Why? Because why in the world should I focus on people, who consider (or don’t) voting important? Does anybody really care about them? No way – I thought before. But now I know that before I didn’t know what I had been talking about.
Of course there are a lot of people who care about ‘choiceless’. The great example may be this famous project in Berlin, which has recently taken place. However, the point is that before this event I didn’t know a lot about non- voters. NOW, when I can talk about them through the whole day…I am even more confused. WHY? Because there are so many reasons (why there are non-voters), so many examples (who are the non–voters), so many consequences (of non–voting) that I just do not know… how to discover various aspects of choiceless&voiceless. If I could, I would use X-ray examination to explore them, but I think it wouldn’t make any sense. In my opinion even the best scientist hasn’t got a clue about WWW – Why, Who, Where.
Is it complicated?
…maybe…
a little bit…
So I can give one illustration which presents why the problem of Choiceless & Voiceless is not so easy to understand. But firstly, I must warn every person who is already reading my article: after seeing this column, you will still not understand C&V. But you’ll understand me, at least.
Formally we have two groups of non-voters: the first part is the people who don’t consider voting important, and the second group consists of people who use non-voting to express their protest against the government. But if you think that’s all about them, you will be surprised. Why? Because many non-voters seem to be more mysterious. For instance, they neither protest against the government nor consider voting unimportant. They may have no information about politicians, they may loose the letters with candidates, the may forget that elections are on Sunday, not on Monday, they may be under 18, they may be in another country. What is worse – it often isn’t their fault. But who is responsible for such a situation then? We talk about diminishing turnout, we walk streets to encourage people to take part in the elections and immediately we hear that somebody is under 18!!! Dear parents, please – try to give birth earlier, that when we finally ask someone ‘did you vote in the last elections’, he or she could find a better reason for non-voting than ‘I am under 18’.
I’ve just shown the first example, why examining non-voters may be such difficult work. The second example may be appropriate to change people’s mind on the streets. Actually I was trying to find out, how many people met in public places consider voting unimportant. Well, I asked: “Did you vote in the last elections?” And what is amazing – almost everybody answered: “Yeah, of course, it’s very important”. And after some time, I decided to tell people that we are doing a project about non-voting, so we are looking for non-voters and, even more amazingly, I heard from most of people: “I didn’t vote…”
Good accident? Maybe.
Or maybe people just lie all the time to make me feel even more confused.
And finally, the third example why non- voters cannot be understood is me. Yeah – I didn’t vote in the last elections, because…yhm…I was in another town, so I didn’t know a lot about my local candidates…(as if I weren’t able to type into Google ‘local candidates from district…’.
Yeah, I must admit – I was just lazy and that means that I cannot be considered as a part of any group presented by me. Maybe there are more people like ‘me before’.
Because NOW – I can proudly say – I am a voter! I want to express my opinion, I wonna change something in my country and on my continent. And I can quote one man met on the street in Berlin:
“You should go and vote, because, as you live in the European Union, you have to know that the European Union’s Parliament takes decisions which affect all of us living in the European Union.”
Is it complicated?
…maybe…
a little bit…
I can’t explain this – now – it is your vote, your voice, your choice.
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