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Generally, very low voter turnout is considered a signal that people become disillusioned and that a change of course is needed.
Marking you ballot in any way except the accepted one on the other hand is usually considered a simple mistake and counted as such. So currently the message you are sending the politicians, as seen from their pov, is that you're happy with the system as-is, but you just failed to follow very simple and easy to understand instructions.
I'm wondering if you misunderstood. I'm saying, folks should go to their polling place, ask for a ballot and intentionally submit it blank. You still get marked down as having voted, and those ballots would conceivably get counted along with marked ballots under voter turnout stats, but it wouldn't be counted in the results.
Having run elections before, blank ballots we just put in a pile and basically ignore. Those who are written on but not filled out correctly, we did have to report on specifics, but blank ones the only thing we reported was the number, and given we don't know if it was supposed to be a protest or someone's pen didn't work and they failed to notice or something else, we didn't actually carry that through to our election reports in any meaningful way. There are always blank votes, but being blank doesn't actually tell you the person meant to submit it blank.
Your assumption is that the people running the elections will interpret a blank vote the same way you meant it. I am not sure at all that is true.
If there were some kind of publicized campaign (Vote for none of the above!) then maybe. But without it, a blank vote doesn't carry useful information in and of itself.
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Yes, I understand you correctly. I've had the discussion on not voting vs false/unmarked voting vs protest voting a bunch of times by now. Whether you keep it blank or do whatever else that results in your vote not counting, it will at best just not end up being noticed at all. The voter turnout is high, the good parties are being voted for, everything is fine. At worst, if people look at statistics on unmarked/wrong ballots they'll just conclude you're to dumb to fill out the ballot appropriately. I've seen that literal reaction in action "oh did you know that like 10% of ballots end up not being counted because they're unmarked or so? That seems high." "Yeah some people can't even vote lol".
Imo the correct course of action is either not voting (after all, if you're disillusioned about something, you would usually not continue engaging in it) or protest vote.
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I think it’s the opposite. Very low turnout means voters are largely happy with the government and don’t think it’s worth spending a few hours voting.
High turnout means you have two groups with broad disagreement that you care deeply about. It gets me to vote. In my view the left is completely insane and the right has some (not all) good policy. If I were in Europe it would be even more important as I think those countries are dying thru immigration.
I'm reporting on how it's perceived by the establishment politicians, and they're usually pretty clear that high turnout = good. Likewise, the establishment media will usually report negatively about record low turnouts and positively vice versa (unless the wrong parties are being voted for, but OP takes care not to do that).
Do the politicians who won actually care about low turnout? The losing candidates and liberal media in my neck of the woods always complain about low voter turnout after every election, but I’ve never gotten the impression that the winners mind in the slightest.
In the short term, no, but in the longer term a low turnout means increased risk in the next election, which drives prioritization and strategy.
The nature of low turnout is that the lower it is, the less stable it is for the incumbent, because ever-smaller groups of interested voters can be decisive in upturning it if they either switch or even just re-enter the voting ranks next election. As voter participation can be volatile, this means that it's relatively easy for sudden surges of voter engagement to turn against an incumbent. As a result, politicians would rather win with low engagement than lose, but what they really want is higher voter turnout of their base, to be more resilient, and a failure of turnout on their end means- even if victorious this time- that things need to change.
Personally, I'd consider this an advantage of voluntary over mandatory voting systems. In mandatory voting systems, there's considerably less volatility as there's a lot less sway in overriding existing factionalism / voter commitment to past votes. (People are less likely to vote against something / someone they've already voted for, and such.) While whether volatility is itself good or bad is questionable, in my view it's an important part of being able to actually challenge incumbents, and incumbents have enough built-in advantages that challenges to them on irregular voter sentiment sways is a good thing.
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