More perspective, please.

(Photo from The Spec)

Over at The Spec, there's a sobering article by Steve Buist, 'Polls and Poverty'. Please go there and read it.

Now, while I appreciate the slant taken here...summed up thusly (my edit):

"Of the 2,132 registered voters in Poll 303 (which had the discouraging distinction of having the lowest voter turnout rate in the last municipal election of Hamilton's 150 non-institutional polls), just 346 of them cast votes in the 2006 municipal election, a dismal rate of just over 16 per cent."

...I do find the fact that the bigger truth about general voter turnout is only perfunctorily addressed to be even more of a concern.

You see, if the across-the-board turnout in the last election was, say 90%, or even 75%, then a 16% turnout would be abysmal, and would certainly highlight the impact that poverty has on participation by this segment of the voting public.

But the turnout for Hamilton was 37%.

Thirty-seven percent.

So to me, as someone who is constantly yammering-on about increasing the 'relationship of engagement' between residents and their councillors by way of effecting a lifestyle shift to greater involvement in their local governance, the article's tack actually does a disservice to the absolutely critical issue of enfranchising those in poverty...by way of benign conflation, if you will. (Articles addressing this passion of mine can be found by searching this blog for the label 'Civic Engagement'.)

Clearly, people in prolonged financial distress need to be more engaged, need their voices heard in order for their travails to be properly understood and acted upon by Council. But if the greater majority of their fellow citizens don't feel obligated to vote, if more than sixty percent of eligible voters decide not to exercise their right to cast ballots, then why would we expect those living in poverty to? Or, to extend the examination: putting aside briefly the realities of how poverty affects every aspect of someone's life, if the rest of society doesn't care about its health and something like the obesity pandemic has been allowed to run rampant, why should our most vulnerable citizens feel motivated to?

I'm not suggesting that getting more people in poverty to vote isn't a reasonable and pragmatic goal. What I am saying is that once again, it seems we might be getting things a little bass-ackward...in the same way we put energies into promoting the migration of business into the city, when we clearly have a 'culture of obstructionism' within the bureaucracy that seems not to facilitate success as it should...but rather manages to achieve the exact opposite.

Changing the way people regard their local governance in general is to me, a far more powerful goal, one whose trickle-down effects -and those elements of behaviour that would bring about such a paradigm shift in the first place- are almost too numerous -and probably esoteric- to list here. What I will say is that were we able to effect such a shift, the corresponding increase in voting within the poverty-rife areas of the city would prove that it is in fact possible to kill two birds with one stone.