Voter turnout for the 2000 American presidential election is expected to be as low as it has often been in the past -- somewhere between 52 and 60 percent -- even though it is a close race between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
Compared to Taiwan's approximately 80 percent turnout rate in the March presidential election, the low voter turnout in the US seems to suggest that there is no definite correlation between democratic progress and voter interest in politics, observers said yesterday.
Eric Chiang (蔣昌成), director of the information division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US told the Taipei Times yesterday that the American people show a higher rate of political participation in local elections than national elections.
"Realizing that their votes won't immediately influence their daily lives in terms of national policies, American voters are less willing to go to the polls and cast their votes in the presidential election," he said.
Chiang, who has worked on Taiwan-American relations in Washington for 20 years, also said yesterday that the comparatively higher turnout rate in Taiwan did not mean that Taiwan is as democratic as the US.
"The American political system functions so well that no matter who is in power, there won't be any drastic difference in their policies," Chiang added, "so, as we have expected this year, no matter whether Gore or Bush is elected president, the US' Taiwan policy will remain substantially unchanged."
American media, during the final weekend of the campaign, had also passionately debated why the turnout rate was declining and what could be done to raise it.
Samuel Popkin, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and Michael McDonald, assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois, Springfield, noted in yesterday's Washington Post that "internationally, democracies with fewer elections, simpler forms of government and shorter ballots have a higher proportion of citizens who vote."
They therefore argued that "the American system of federalism and separation of powers -- requiring multiple votes at the national and state level -- will always produce lower turnouts."
Popkin and McDonald, moreover, suggested that "perhaps the single most promising innovation to improve turnout within the multi-election system in the US would be voting by mail, which gives people more time to navigate lengthy ballots."
A Taiwanese senior reporter at the China Times Express (中時晚報), Li Tsu-shun (李祖舜), who is currently visiting Washington with fellow journalists, however, believes that the nature of elections and voters' temperament are among the key factors affecting the turnout rate. He said that, theoretically, rural voters who are less educated and have lower average incomes care less about elections. But the turnout rate in rural Taiwan seems to present the opposite picture.
"Most evidence there suggests that some of [those votes] are bought, which guarantees a certain turnout rate," Li said, adding that voting by mail is unlikely to be implemented in Taiwan, since it is susceptible to manipulation.
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