Honest Voting

I have to admit I didn’t understand how compulsory voting worked in countries like Australia and elsewhere. In the back of my mind I must have imagined people clocking in like characters in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Compulsory voting has strengths and weaknesses. The primary goal is to maintain access to voting for groups that might otherwise find themselves disenfranchised — a laudable idea that doesn’t sound too bad at the moment here in the United States, where voters lose their right to vote for reasons fair and foul. The downside for people who don’t want to vote is that they may have sanctions levied against them, anything from difficulty finding child care to being unable to withdraw your salary from the bank.

The “compulsory” aspect can mean either that you have to register (or are automatically registered), or that you also have to show up at the polling place and cast your ballot in some manner.

It’s the “in some manner” that can get interesting. Until today I hadn’t thought about how people in a compulsory-voting nation would protest if they didn’t like the parties or candidates available.

In Australia the tendency is to scrawl illegibly across one’s ballot or to leave it blank (it’s a secret ballot, after all). In Canada, though, some citizens have decided the answer is to eat your ballot.

In Canada a determined voting protester with a taste for fine dining and psephophagy* should contact the Edible Ballot Society, where you can meet other connoisseurs of disgruntlement, or even pick up ballot recipes like “Rachel’s Ballot Smoothie.”

Unfortunately, psephophagy may be illegal in Canada, so unless you’re ready for the consequences of your protest, don’t bring your wok to the polls. But if that form of dissent is to your taste, then bon appetit.

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*I made this word up myself, from the Greek for “pebble,” as used in the word “psephology,” the study of election results.

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