Don Anderson | Is Jamaican democracy at risk?

Voter turnout has shown significant decline since the election of 1989. Prior to that election voter turnout averaged a healthy 82 per cent per election up to the election of 1980. The 1983 election was boycotted by the PNP and in the next election of 1989, 78 per cent turned out to vote.

Between 1992 and 2020, the average voter turnout was 56 per cent, with an all-time low of 38 per cent in 2020. There is no question that the COVID 19 pandemic played a part in the low voter turnout for 2020, but the significant decline in voter participation started much earlier than that and has continued in a virtually precipitous manner since then. This is despite the fact that voter registration has seen significant increases each year, including an additional 90,000 voters between the elections of 2016 and 2020.

This pattern of election specific registration, which continued to 2001, was partially responsible for the high voter turnout as persons were able to register to vote once the election date was announced.

When the process changed to one of continuous registration with persons being added at six monthly intervals, there was a noticeable decline in voter participation in elections.

The rate of increase in the total number of voters registered then began to significantly outstrip the number of persons who actually voted. It is speculated that a significant number of persons who have registered as voters since 2001 did so to acquire an acceptable government ID as the voters ID has been regarded as the most widely accepted form of official government verification of identity.

Acquisition of a voter ID and registration as a voter then is seen not as a means to facilitate voting but more so as a means of providing nationals with a proper ID.

While this has been anecdotally stated for a number of years, there is no scientific data that supports this belief.

WIDENING GAP

What is patently clear is that the gap between those who are registered to vote and those who actually turn out to vote has widened considerably over the last six elections since 1997.

A number of surveys done by my team from Market Research Services Limited on this issue points definitively and conclusively to the fact that there has been a growing level of disaffection with politics in general and with the two main parties.

It has become patently clear since then that more and more persons have become disillusioned with voting, with politicians and with the political parties of the day.

The evidence of this is from polls done in recent years to examine this issue. In part, two questions have been included to specifically gauge this development.

The first, “do you intend to vote?” and the second “why is it that you do not intend to vote?”.

Over the years, answers to these two questions have conditioned the conclusions that a significant number of voters see politics as dirty, involvement futile and a waste of time, and that persons were losing hope in politicians in general. Voters feel that the environment is littered with broken or false promises and there is very little hope for a consistent level of commitment to serve the people who elected them.

Comparable numbers for the 2011 election reveal the following:1,646,036 persons were now on the voters’ roll, yet the number of voters who turned up was 877,824 or merely 17,000 more than voted in the 1980 election, 31 years earlier.

By then voter turnout had fallen to 53 per cent.

Subsequent elections in 2016 and 2020 served to consolidate this growing deficit.

The net result is that 872,000 voted in the 2016 election, 5,000 fewer than the number who voted in 2011, against an increase in the number of registered voters of close to 200,000 persons.

By 2020, COVID election year, the number who turned out to vote fell by over 160,000 despite an increase in the number of eligible voters by some 90,000. Some of this decline can no doubt be attributed to the pandemic, but against the patterns of significant decline since 1989, this does not adequately explain the obvious turn-off as this represents a continuation of a pattern of decline which set in from 1989.

The argument that several other countries are showing this level of falloff does not mean that democracy is not at risk. Indeed, it could mean that it is definitely at risk in these countries as well.

It does not augur well for any country when 38 per cent of the registered voters decide who will run the country. It should also be noted that not all persons of voting age do register anyway.

SURVEY AMONG 15-17-YEAR-OLDS

A survey conducted by me round about 2005 among persons 15-17 pointed to very little awareness of the political process among this age cohort, let alone interest in voting. Indeed, they spoke just as disparagingly about politics as their more seasoned and older colleagues.

Politics was not for them, they knew very little and wanted to know very little. Politics has not appealed in any real sense to the young persons and this is further evidenced when polls are done. A significant number of these young persons say they do not intend to vote and understandably so.

Today there is a real gulf between those registered and those who vote.

More than 1.2 million persons who were registered to vote in 2020 did not do so.

The total number of persons registered to vote has grown by over 140 per cent between 1962 and 2020, but the number of actual voters has gone up by a mere 23 per cent over this 60-year period, hence the yawning gap indicated in the chart.

Real reasons for this disturbing reality need to be established and corrective measures pursued to cauterise this growing level of voter apathy.

It is my considered view that when this issue is addressed with the level of seriousness and commitment it deserves, (based on my assessment of the large body of empirical that is with me) that this will force the political parties in particular and politicians in general to reassess their current modus operandi and to be more cognisant of their obligations to the people they are charged with the responsibility to serve.

It will be interesting to see how many persons turn out to vote in the next general elections when they are called. A further decline in the level of participation in those elections will surely be a firm confirmation that democracy is at great risk in this country.

- Don Anderson is executive chairman of Market Research Services Limited and a former senior adjunct lecturer in research methods at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He has successfully conducted political polls in at least eight countries in the Caribbean. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com