WORLD VIEW: The right to remain silent

By Mark Scheinbaum

MIAMI (SEPT. 28, 2016)—Those white male farmers, land owners, slave owners, attorneys, authors and others in Philadelphia in 1776 had some pretty good ideas about human liberty and human rights.

A couple of years later when the young USA drafted a Constitution, it included a Bill of Rights which gave citizens the right to speak, but also to shut up.

This brings us to the story of your Right to Not Vote.

In Australia and North Korea (and 20 other countries), voting is compulsory. These countries apparently think forcing you to vote (and facing fines or prison for not voting) builds good civics and good government.

In Costa Rica, Panama, Libya and other countries, there is also mandatory voting, but it is not enforced.

A bunch of other countries tried forcing people to vote and then dropped the whole idea as unenforceable or stupid.

Political scientists have yards of literature about your right to not vote for people you do not like and your right to protest against your government by not voting.

But perhaps there is a greater issue, which is the right to be wrong. You have the right to be a contrarian or the right to back a loser.

The responsibility to vote would seem inherently to include your right to vote for mayor, state representative, school board member, but not President.

You have the right to vote for President and Member of Congress. You have the right to vote for your choice for U.S. Senate and no one else. You also have the right to sit out the election.

If this gets you thinking even a tiny bit about representative democracy (even in a flawed electoral state voting system), then you need to resist or rebuke people who say  voting for a Third or Fourth Party candidate is “a wasted vote” or an automatic vote helping someone else you might or might not support.

Think about the broad spectrum:  do you support living in a country where you are forced to vote and where you are socially also pressured not to “waste” your vote for a minor party’s marginal or “extreme” candidate disdained by some other people?

Think about whether or not the United States of America somehow evolves a more efficient economy or stable foreign policy if:

–Diehard segregationists never had the right to vote for George Wallace for President?

–Civil rights and women’s activists could not cast Democratic Primary votes for President for former black New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm?

–Outside –the-Beltway independents totaling 19 per cent of the national voters could not support billionaire technology magnate H. Ross Perot?

–Independent or anti-war or anti-something candidates such as Eugene McCarthy, John Anderson,  or even Eugene V. Debs never ran for office?

The late Haitian “President for Life” Dr. Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier said everyone had to vote.

Trucks and busses picked up voters on election day, handed them a bottle of cheap first press rum (called clairin) and a color coded card to put in the ballot box.

To show a “Communist threat” a la Cuba, Duvalier made sure five or ten per cent of the votes went to a phantom Communist Party in Haiti, thus securing some more U.S. foreign aid money.

For every media talking head who tells you that you have a duty to vote or you are a bad citizen, take a moment to think about your absolute right to vote for exactly whom you want, of any party, or to not vote at all, or to vote a partial ballot.

By the way, how has that voting plan in North Korea been going recently?

Former UPI Newsman and Political Science professor Mark Scheinbaum is managing director of Shearson Financial Services LLC of Boca Raton, FL and his opinions are his own.