98. INTERPRETING THE RESULTS - What Do Votes Ever Really Tell Us?

The title to this post seems fitting, as I write this on the day that the Immense Health Clinic PCR testing facility in Wolverhampton here in the UK has been shut down after at least 43,000 PCR tests for Covid-19 were found to have returned a false negative result, leading to many contagious people returning to workplaces and spreading this tenacious and seemingly unrelenting virus further. Although potentially philosophically interesting from an epistemological point of view (prior to this the less reliable LFT home swab was seen as inferior to the gold-standard PCR in terms of knowing whether or not we had Covid, but now we are being told to trust the LFT and doubt the PCR when the LFT shows as positive, even if a subsequent PCR suggests you are negative: what was knowledge yesterday is no longer knowledge today…) that was not the sort of results I was thinking about. Instead, I was thinking about election results, and what they actually tell us. Sadly, that is also fitting to today’s news - the fatal stabbing of Conservative MP David Amess and the reminder that democracy, if that is what this thing we have is, remains a very fragile thing indeed.

As a teacher, I do a lot of mini elections in the classroom. Especially following debates and discussions in philosophy. Sometimes I get students to vote on what topic they want to discuss today. Frequently I get students to vote on who they thought won a particular argument. That alone is interesting, as it shows there is no binding power of a majority vote in and of itself. When my students vote 20 to 8 that they think the proposition team won a particular debate, the uneven numbers do not force the eight who disagreed with the majority to have to change their minds. However, if the students vote 20 to 8 to discuss topic A instead of topic B, then the minority eight are expected to get involved discussing something they previously had no desire to discuss and actively voted against. The first poll merely informs, the second transforms.

The same is true in democracies. Only do those sanctioned General Elections every few years lead to the numbers of votes cast enacting any real change in the world. Before election day - perhaps for many years before election day - other polls are taken. Opinion polls, surveys, etc. People note down their preferences and tick one box instead of the other, but there is no immediate consequence which follows from the numerical results. In some cases, a political party might choose to shift some policy position to be more popular. In other cases, merely the rhetoric used to sell the same unpopular policy will be changed. People might have been opposed to supply-chain obstacles, fuel shortages and renewed tensions in Northern Ireland, but they would still support something called a “Brexit”. People might support affordable healthcare available to all, but would oppose something called “Obamacare”.

Following elections, commentators will often point to such polls. They might suggest the result is a surprise because prior polling seemed to show voters believing one thing only to end up voting for another. A strange notion: if we know what the people want, and the people didn’t vote for what they seemed to be wanting, then either we didn’t know what they wanted from the original polls (in which case: why would these latest electoral polls be any more reliable at showing us what they want?) or they didn’t vote for what they actually wanted (in which case, why does this new, outlying, vote take priority to all the previous, different and more consistent, votes which preceded it?)

A few weeks ago a class of 28 were voting on whether they leaned towards physicalist or dualist intuitions about body and mind following a series of thought-experiments. Our first vote added up only to 19 people. a high voter turnout of 68%. Several students suggested that the results weren’t accurate because not everyone had voted. I suggested that they were very accurate: they showed that only 19 people cared enough to have an opinion.

Earlier this week, another class were discussing naming a new building the school has recently opened. They wondered if its name could be put to the public vote. Many rolled their eyes, remembering the era of “Boaty McBoatface”. If we asked the students to name the new building, would we just end up with “Building McBuildingface”? We might do, I remarked. But not because, as some of the class suggested, people are inherently bad at picking names democratically. More because outcomes like “Boaty McBoatface” show us that the people voting don’t really care about what they’re voting for. Or, more accurately, that they are not informed enough to really understand the consequences of their decisions. “Boaty McBoatface” might seem like a funny idea when scrolling through your Twitter feed, but when entering that preference as a legitimate choice later, other thoughts were needed beyond thinking only what might be funny. Being informed means so much more than merely knowing all the choices. It means actually understanding the consequences of each choice, who would be effected by each choice, and what the interests are of all those who would be effected. A vote without fully informed and fully understanding voters is a vote whose results don’t really tell us anything concrete about their voting preferences at all. If one person votes for what would be funniest, another for what would be best for everyone, another for what would be best for their particular interests and the interests of people like them, another still for what would be most destructive…whichever outcome wins the vote does not tell us which outcome would be “best”. It merely gives us the data that there are X amount of people who vote for what is funny, Y amount of people who vote in what they believe to be everyone’s interests, Z amount of people who vote more selfishly than that, etc… Interesting information, sure. But nothing that entails we ought to act on it. Let alone act on it as if it is in some way sacrosanct. The election results have not “spoken”. We must not obey them without question. There are actually many questions which might need to be asked.

Which is not to say elections couldn’t be worth acting on. An election where everyone agrees not only to the importance and purpose of what is being voted for, and commits to informing themselves and fully understanding all of the available choices, but also to abiding by the majority outcome (even if it is not what they personally voted for) is an entirely plausible, and potentially desirable, idea. On issues where there are recognised clashes which will never be resolved in any other way, majority rule seems a very reasonable way of getting out of a logjam and picking a side pragmatically. Most importantly, those on all sides of the issue can conceivably agree to that scenario, and the election as a reasonable process to resolve it.

But most elections aren’t like this. Even our most “important” ones. For example, in the last UK General Election many ticked their particular box on the assumption that it was a vote about whether or not we “Get Brexit Done”. Which was certainly part of it, but not all. It was also a vote about what sort of government we wanted for all things. It was a vote about the sort of people we want running the country in the event of an unexpected emergency, such as a global pandemic, for instance. Without a shared agreement on what we are voting about, or equal understanding of all of the different options and their potential impact and consequences, all we are doing is taking another badly worded opinion poll. Interesting numbers, able to be interpreted and re-interpreted by whatever hermeneutics we choose to reinforce our biases. But a far cry from “the will of the people”.

Which is not an argument for an epistocracy - an electorate of only those knowledgable enough to vote. An elite system of selected “knowers” making wise decisions for the rest of us ignorant plebs. Far from it. It is a reminder that the arguments for democracy are independent from the mechanics of voting and, too frequently, true, authentic, democracy is impeded by those unfit mechanics, not aided by it. If we are serious about wanting an election result which yields meaningful information, we therefore have a duty to make elections meaningful, not just numerical. An informed understanding of the issues and the available options, rigorous discussion beyond soundbites and empty “gotcha” journalism, democracies of scale, so that those with a stake in the outcome are heard, not drowned out by those who don’t, an agreement from all who vote in it on what exactly we are trying to find out from the poll and, crucially, a buy-in to that poll as the most effective method of gaining that information, as well as a commitment to abide by its results for as long as it is agreed to be reasonable to do so.

Until a vote is truly meaningful, and democracies truly democratic, we will continue to have only the pseudo-democracies we currently inhabit. Where politicians and public relations firms can weaponise the confusion about what an election is ostensibly asking us, where hidden online conversations on social media influence different groups about specific and diametrically opposed issues supposedly to be answered by the exact same question, entering the voting booth with an agenda which exists only in their own mind. An illusion that some votes make magic, and have the power to change reality, while others simply gather data to be ignored, leaving us slaves to the whims and ignorance of people playing a whole series of completely different electoral game than we are when we put our cross in the box.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.