A Better Case for Voting

Four reasons courtesy of Lorenzo Córdova:

1. Because with the legal design we have presently there exists no possibility of distinguishing the annulled vote motivated by protest from those which were merely cast in error.

2. Because it's not true that the parties are the same. There exists an evident discontent toward the politicians that transcends party borders, but there are also various aspects of crucial social importance that distinguish them and that relate to different positions regarding issues like decriminalization of abortion, the method of combating organized crime, the nature of the response to the economic crisis, the type of fiscal reform proposed, the attitude toward inequality and poverty, et cetera.

3. Because the representative organs (in this case the Chamber of Deputies) is going to completely turn over, regardless of the number of abstentions or null votes, and nothing guarantees that the parties will take note of the protest that they seek to make with their vote annulment. Furthermore, I am convinced that a citizen that votes for a party has more moral authority to protest the party's or their representatives' reasons and motives for their actions. After all, a low voter turnout doesn't in any way suggest an increase in accountability, on the contrary.

4. Finally, and this is my most important reason, the call to not vote or annul the vote does nothing less than hand the game over, consciously or not, to the positions adopted by the big economic and media interest groups, which have for years have gone about constructing a systematic and common discourse discrediting politics, politicians, and the parties. It suffices to watch the headline news programs on the television to understand the point.

[Break]

The challenges that we have to confront as a society are to refuse false exits (like abstention and null voting) and to find true mechanisms for demanding (not only during the elections, but permanently) that the political class behaves itself in a manner appropriate to the grave problems which the country is traversing.