Sept/Oct 2013
Aff: Turnout Inequality Harms Democracy
foundationbriefs.com
Page 27 of 104
Turnout inequality harms democracy
Low turnout harms legitimacy of government. RMF
Lever, Annabelle. 2009. Is Compulsory Voting Justified. Public Reason 1 (1): 57-74.
Lower turnout seems to threaten the legitimacy of a country’s government and electoral system, because
it significantly increases the likelihood that governments will reflect a minority, rather than a majority, of
registered voters, and of the voting-population, itself. As Ferdinand Mount said, commenting on the report of the Power Inquiry, in Britain, when little more than 20% of the electorate has voted for the winning party, as in the United Kingdom general election of May 2005, legitimacy begins to drain away. He adds, If only just over half of us bother to vote at all in national elections and scarcely a third in local elections, the bureaucracy
begins to think of elections as a tiresome and increasingly insignificant interruption in its continuous
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