Hold It! Don't Get Out the Vote

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

THE DEAFENING CHORUS HAS BEGUN: REGISTER AND Vote. It's the essence of our ! freedom. It's your civic duty. If you don't vote, you're lazy, ignorant, apathetic, damn near a traitor. This message, shrieked every four years, has not been persuasive. The percentage of eligible voters who go to the polls keeps dropping toward the 50% mark. But the result is greater hysteria.

A better response would be to shut up. Driving reluctant citizens to the polls out of some vague sense of guilt is no accomplishment; they would cast ignorant ballots, impelled by emotion or bias, that would further lower the tone of American campaigns. The freedom to ignore politics is a democratic liberty almost as precious as the freedom to participate. And for many intelligent, well-informed citizens who care passionately about the nation's future, not voting can be a principled strategy of protest.

None of this argues against efforts to make registration and voting easier, like "motor voter" laws and reduction of length-of-residence requirements. Citizens who want to vote should not have any barriers put in their way.

But what of those who could easily pull the lever but won't bestir themselves? They tend to be people who are too wrapped up in their daily life to pay much attention to outside matters -- TV, sports and rock music perhaps excepted. If incessant nagging did push them into the polling booths, there is no warrant for believing it would also provoke them to study the issues and the candidates' backgrounds. At a bad best, their votes would be prompted by some irrelevant emotional factor, a candidate's age or winning smile, perhaps.

These also are the people most susceptible to cleverly crafted but dishonest attack ads. I am thinking of the woman who, four years ago, told me she had just learned, obviously from a Bush campaign TV spot, that Michael Dukakis "believes in turning murderers loose." She was uncertain whether she would vote; let us hope she didn't and won't. Worst of all, campaigns that play on racial animosity might have a dangerous appeal to people who now tend to stay home on Election Day. Bigotry and nonvoting both correlate with low income and education.

There are, of course, intelligent citizens of goodwill who also ignore politics. One of the glories of our society is that they can do so safely. The engineer, chemist or doctor hard put to keep up with the demands of his profession for study and knowledge; the artist, musician or scholar totally engrossed in her field -- in a totalitarian society they would not be allowed to be apolitical. To advance in their professions they would have to join The Party and devote some time to propagandizing for it. In a democratic country a physicist can pass up any participation in politics in order to spend every possible moment pondering the structure of the atom, and may well serve society better by doing so.

But not all nonvoters are uninformed or uninterested. There are some -- hard to count, but intuition would suggest a large and growing number -- who study, and think deeply about, the issues. They listen to the candidates. And they find none to whom they would entrust the future of the country.

No one person can speak for them, since they -- we -- are moved largely by an aversion to groupthink. But perhaps my reasoning is not unrepresentative. I believe, on the basis of considerable experience in writing about economics and a good deal of careful thought, that the federal deficit is a menace that if not curbed will bring disaster on the nation. Love of country argues against damaging it by voting for someone who will make the deficit even worse, and in all likelihood, either George Bush or Bill Clinton would. (Bush's record speaks for itself. Clinton proposes big spending increases that by his own figures would well exceed the piddling tax boosts and defense- expenditure cuts he promises; given that, his talk of deficit reduction through economic growth is 1980-vintage Ronald Reagan voodoo.) Ross Perot's economic program makes sense, but Perot has given evidence that he lacks the judgment, balance and character to be President. Casting a protest vote for someone who has no chance to win is fine, but casting one for a candidate the voter would not want to win is unconscionable.

The conventional advice is to choose the lesser evil. Even if Bush and Clinton would both be bad, a patriot should vote for the one he thinks would hurt the country least. It is a powerful argument, and one not fully refuted by observing (though it is the truth) that lesser-of-two-evils votes are increasingly misinterpreted as satisfaction with politics as it exists. Won't nonvotes be taken that way too? Won't the winner be fortified in the belief that the way to get elected is to keep pandering to the special interests that will not tolerate any serious attack on the deficit (or whatever other problem might most concern a troubled citizen), since those who dislike this kind of electioneering don't bother to vote? That is a serious risk. But there is a difference in the size of the winner's (to be realistic, probably Clinton's) margin. A 15-point victory might encourage him -- and cow his opponents -- into thinking that the public so loves his promises of $1 worth of government for 76 cents paid in taxes that he must produce exactly that. A much narrower win just might put him on notice that he has a mandate only to change things for the better, and that his ability to do so is sufficiently distrusted that he dare not purchase a one-year recovery and longer-term disaster by pumping up the economy and the deficit. It is a slender hope, but what other do we have?