Flynt is a polarizing man. Some see him as a vile purveyor of society-eroding crap, yet others hold him up as a free-speech hero. which was mostly the view espoused by the 1996 movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, wherein Woody Harrelson played the titular role. The reality, as with all such things, is that he's probably somewhere in the middle.Anyhow, on the plane ride over from Australia, I watched a documentary called Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone, by Midtown Films which you can actually check out here in its entirety. (Surprisingly, there were several documentaries on porn available on the in-flight entertainment system. Another one I watched was a BBC doc called Hardcore Profits.) Flynt has been a long-time critic of various U.S. governments and has often pointed the finger at politicians - rather than himself - for eroding society's morals through their own corruption. Part of Hustler's mission, other than running sex pictorials, of course, has therefore been the exposing of such hypocrisy. One of the examples I've always found amusing was the situation with Charles Keating, the lawyer who led the morality charge against Flynt in the 1980s, and was then later convicted of fraud, racketeering and corruption in the big savings and loan scandal.
In the documentary, Flynt again took aim at politicians, but also at the American public for failing in its ultimate civic duty: voting. By staying away from polls, the American people allowed George W. Bush to get elected and re-elected. The Bush administration, Flynt said, has done more than any previous government to erode civil liberties and reverse many of the gains that people like Flynt have fought for.
He's actually a lot less self-righteous than I make him sound, but one of the points he made really got me thinking. Flynt believes that one of the things Americans need to do to prevent people like Bush from getting elected, and thereby screwing things up, is to enact mandatory voting. In other words, if you don't vote, you're breaking the law so you need to pay a penalty - Flynt's prescription is a $500 fine.
Flynt is certainly not the first person to make such a suggestion, but it's the first time I'd heard it. I thought about its merits and failings for days and wondered whether it could apply to Canada as well as to the United States, and have come to the unequivocal answer of: yes, it's a great frickin' idea!
The benefits of forcing people to vote under penalty of a sizable fine are pretty clear: you can be damn sure you'll get good turnout, and thereby more people are likely to pay attention to big political issues. With a big turnout, you'll also minimize - if not make impossible - the chances of a minority government happening.
Minority governments are generally very bad. In essence, such a government is paralyzed from taking any decisive actions, good or bad, because it's worried about the fragility of its hold on power. As such, nothing important gets done because anything that rocks the boat can trigger an election or cause the opposition parties to gang up and oust the ruling party (see Canada and prorogation). A majority government can make whatever moves it wants, but it has to be mindful of paying the price for anything too unpopular in the next election. But that's the beauty of democracy - and it's why I almost shed a tear in watching Obama get elected, because it's exactly what happened in the U.S.
Worse still, as I've pointed out before, minority governments aren't beholden to the population because they weren't really elected by the people. Instead, they give free reign to lobbyists, who ultimately pay the campaign bills, which is certainly what's happening in Canada.
Any move to boost voter turnout and thereby limit lobbyist influence is, by any stretch of the imagination, a good one.
There are, of course, some downsides to compulsory voting, although none that I read about or could think of seem to hold any water. Surely in such systems you have uneducated voters go into the booth and cast their support for superficial reasons (i.e. the leader of party X is good looking), but you have that now anyway. Some people also allege that voting itself is a freedom, so you shouldn't have to do it, but that's a rather dumb argument. If you live in a democracy, you have to pay taxes and obey the law. Adding voting to that list of small requirements is hardly burdensome.
I might go a step further than Flynt and suggest that while voting be made mandatory, we should also enact rules that would exclude stupid people from the democratic process. But that's a whole other can of worms for another day...
In any event, it's ironic that I was turned on to the idea of compulsory voting on a flight from Australia, a country that actually has it! Alas, the penalty in Australia for not voting is less than a $100, but the rules still keep turnout up around 95 per cent, which is helped by the fact that elections are generally held on a weekend so people aren't prevented from voting by work commitments. Australia is also just one of many countries that forces citizens to vote - and we're not talking about military dictatorships in Africa, either. Ten OECD countries have some form of compulsory voting.
The issue has been raised in Canada before, particular after the 2006 election, which drew a record low turnout of about 60 per cent. Not much has come of it, obviously, as turnout continued to drop to 59 per cent in the 2008 election.
The U.S. managed to reverse a similar trend with a powerful and charismatic leader who promised big change (and who is delivering it, by the way), but such people come along once in a blue moon. There's no sign of the Canadian Obama, so in the meantime we desperately need to take a lesson from Australia in general, and from a certain smut purveyor in particular.
UPDATE: Interestingly, as the UK counts votes in its latest elections, that it too has seen a steady erosion in voter turnout. Check out the chart here, which measures the plummeting turnout since 1945.
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