How much is our democracy worth?

I just found out that close to 50% of the Chilean population eligible to vote doesn’t.

You can read a deeper reflection on my brother’s site. Since I’m the square one, I’m going to put up numbers.

“In the recent municipal elections, 4,565,000 people refrained from casting a valid vote (unregistered, registered who didn’t vote, spoiled and blank ballots), representing close to 44% of the total electoral universe, estimated at 10,500,000.”

Checking the results

Since I’m politically incorrect, I’m going to run the analysis on our favorite senator.

In 2001 Senator Flores got 26.96% of the votes, which represents some 47,159 votes in favor, the top result in his region. This data can be obtained from the Electoral Registry (careful, the site is not Firefox-friendly).

Spoiled ballots were 8.28%, representing 14,499 votes, and blank ballots were 5,892, that is, 3.37%.
That gives us a total of 11.65%, for a total of 20,391 votes.

The second-highest result, which went to the UDI candidate Jaime Orpis, was 21.77%, with 38,093 votes.

OK.

According to the 2002 Census, Region I has 428,524 inhabitants, of whom 353,576 are in a position to vote (including those who were 15 in 2002, and removing those over 100). In 2001 there were some 321,639 inhabitants.

Of the inhabitants of Region I, some 231,211 are registered (65.39%), but in 2001 there were 230,119 registered (71.54%).

In other words, citizen participation has dropped by 6.15%!!! Because the population has aged and barely 1,092 new voters have registered.

Besides, if only 71.54% of the population of Tarapacá took part, then Flores was elected by just 19.28% of the population of Tarapacá, and Orpis by 8% of the population in a position to elect senators.

The situation is similar in every region.

In fact, Lagos beat Lavín with 51.3%. If we consider that abstention was 44%, then our president was elected by 28.56% of the population.

First of all, I have nothing against any elected senator; they won their seats fair and square. The problem is with us, the citizens. Lack of participation is dangerous.

The purpose of this post is to make those who don’t participate take notice. We citizens have to be careful: abstention suits the political establishment, and suits it a lot, even more so with a binomial electoral system like the one we have.

This deserves to be taken into account and discussed. Is it worth voting?

This is the explanation for the lack of renewal among our politicians, and for the indolence with which some of them do their jobs. If we want to keep watch over our authorities, we have to take part in the process of electing them. And those authorities should bear in mind that they are actually governing with very little support, and they are left to it because apparently the people don’t care about them.

(for the electoral registry data for Tarapacá see source).