This frustrates me as well. It is so incredibly common, yet it never passes even basic scrutiny. For one, even in typical modern democracies, the active administration is chosen by like a third of the voting population via a first-pass-the-post system or a close analog of it. It's easy to ignore this when things are going okay, but becomes very uncomfortable all of a sudden when that changes.
And this is to say nothing about how it is people that are chosen, not their individual choices. This is why it irks me when people are interviewed about their knowhow with respect to their political stance. It's basically irrelevant. They need a good read on the person of their choice, not a good read on the choices. If it was about a choice instead of a person, it would be a referendum, not an election.
> For one, even in typical modern democracies, the active administration is chosen by like a third of the voting population via a first-pass-the-post system or a close analog of it
"typical modern democracies" don't use the extremely terrible first past the post. It's mostly used in the UK and a few former colonies, but most of the world's democracies (even the flawed ones) have realised its shortcomings and have evolved past it.
This list includes Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, etc...
Not that only FPTP is terrible either - it is just what people evoke when they say "well xy people voted for this, right?". In more fair systems, the voted person or party may not even have been their first or second choice, so that on its own violates this notion again too, just differently.
> the active administration is chosen by like a third of the voting population
Not really. The number of people who might change their minds and thus swing the result either way is indeed small. But it isn't accurate to say they are the ones that choose.
The people in guaranteed states/counties still choose; it's just that almost always choose the same answer.
But even that doesn't mean they can be ignored. They can be ignored at voting time, but before that political parties have to take them into account. They basically determine where the centre is. For example they are the reason the American centre is so much further right than the UK centre.
If you took American parties and held an election of them in the UK you would find that all those reliably conservative counties who you would say don't have any effect on the result are suddenly not so supportive of the right-wing option.
>> the active administration is chosen by like a third of the voting population
> Not really.
Yes, REALLY. In fact it can be even worse.
See the latest (June 2023) elections in Greece [1] (supposedly the cradle of democracy): First party got a 40.56% on a 53.74% turnout. I.e. around 22% of the electorate. Yet, this was adequate to yield a solid parliamental majority for 4 years.
Also mind that the election system had been changed to allow this travesty by the very same party and PM that won the June 2023 elections.
Low turnout means non-voters just don't care, or that they find no palpable option on the ballot sheet.
In any case, the non-voters are OK with whatever party might win, because otherwise they should have made their vote or created a political party that might be agreeable to them.
You are just rationalizing a deeply undemocratic process. These are the exact self-serving arguments that the winners make to legitimize a fundamendally unpopular government.
Also, in practice, no, you cannot make a political party in Greece. There's a country-wide threshold of 3% that you need to exceed to get into the parliament. A lot of well-organized parties struggle (and often fail) to exceed it. So even if you get 100% in an electoral district, you won't get its respective parliament seats. In fact (IIRC the tidbits of the election law), you will be making the first party stronger (and I don't mean by depriving votes from the second party).
This is not unlike other Western democracies. But this is essentially a design to cull any grassroot movements. Not very democratic.
>Also, in practice, no, you cannot make a political party in Greece. There's a country-wide threshold of 3% that you need to exceed to get into the parliament.
You can quibble about whether a 3% threshold is "democratic" or not, but for all practical purposes if your movement can't get 3% you stand no chance of getting your policies enacted.
Which is still distinct from actively choosing something. Indifference is not the same active approval, precisely because it goes both ways. So it is still incorrect to state that "they chose that". They chose indifference.
One can still fault them of course, but it is a distinct category, and it is not at all a clear sign of consent, if even the active choice ever was.
> Low turnout means non-voters [...] find no palpable option on the ballot sheet.
That alone is pretty un-democratic, no? Certainly politics is a world where it's hard to find an ideal situation pretty much ever, but I think a democracy where a third or more of eligible voters don't want to support any available candidate... that doesn't sound particularly democratic.
The US with its two-party system suffers from this problem, and it's a very bad one. There were more eligible voters in our 2024 presidential election that didn't vote at all (89M) than there were people who voted for Trump (77M) or Harris (73M). It's pretty messed up that more than a third of the electorate was so dissatisfied with their options that they didn't cast a ballot at all.
I think the GP actually meant a third of eligible voters, not of those who actually vote. Turnout is often not that great in countries that don't legally require voting, especially when voters are dissatisfied with the choices they have. In the 2024 US presidential election, for example, ~89 million eligible voters did not vote, which puts Trump's win at 32% of eligible voters, just under a third.
Whether or not this is a useful/interesting metric is debatable, I suppose.
Swing voters / swing states / whatever the particular country-specific analog is -- this is a symptom of poor voting systems; unfortunately the people in power like how this works, and so it won't change.
It's also, at least in the US, a collective action problem: a state that tries to be more "fair" (doesn't gerrymander, perhaps awards presidential electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote percentages, etc.) will end up giving seats/votes to the "other side" more often than polarized states that stick with FPTP.
I meant that if one checks "who voted for this", one will find that it's at best the half of a poor voter turnout, so around 30-40% of the overall voting population. Often even that is generous.
And this is to say nothing about how it is people that are chosen, not their individual choices. This is why it irks me when people are interviewed about their knowhow with respect to their political stance. It's basically irrelevant. They need a good read on the person of their choice, not a good read on the choices. If it was about a choice instead of a person, it would be a referendum, not an election.