We live in political times, which is an observation that isn’t diminished by the fact that in many democracies a lot of people don’t care about politics at all. We know this because  of voter turnout numbers, a measure of what is the most minimal level of political involvement.

This is a point I first started thinking seriously about twenty years ago while reviewing the pollster Michael Adams’s book American Backlash. “Non-voters are the majority non-party in American politics,” I said in my review. At the time, the most recent presidential election had been in 2004, which felt like another very political time, what with George W. Bush running for a second term after the Iraq War. As a percentage of the voting-age population though the turnout was only 56.7%. In 2024 it was 59%, which was actually down 3.8% from the 2020 presidential election.

In the U.K. general elections in 2024 the voter turnout was nearly the same at 60%, which was the lowest turnout since 2001, when it was 59.4%.

Canada does a little better federally, averaging in the mid-60s in the last couple of decades. But again, these numbers are all national. At the state and provincial level the numbers drop considerably. In Ontario’s just finished provincial election the voter turnout was 45.4% of eligible voters. This was one percent higher than the last provincial election, which was the lowest voter turnout in the history of our provincial elections.

Drill down to the municipal level and the numbers drop even further. In my hometown’s last municipal election in 2022 only 28% of eligible voters voted. A number that was down 8% from 2018! The 2023 mayoral election in Toronto had a turnout of 38%. To take a random municipal election from the U.K., the turnout for the Sunderland City Council election in 2024 was 30.8%. The 2024 mayoral election for London hit 40.5%.

What this seems to underline is the fact that, to invert the famous adage often associated with the American politician Tip O’Neill that all politics is local, today all politics is national. Just as local news media have been dying, leaving no one covering city hall, the public’s attention has been focused more and more exclusively on politics at the national level. And with the importance of the Internet to fundraising this has only become more pronounced.

This is something I find very concerning, for reasons that I’ve talked about before. Chief among these is the fact that a lot of national political debate is of less direct consequence to citizens than what is going on at the local level, and that if no one is paying attention to what’s happening locally you’re opening the door to a level of corruption that (I think) would shock people if they were aware of it. I know I’ve been shocked by it when I’ve had dealings with local government in both rural and urban areas. You know things are bad when a single family has half-a-dozen members filling different jobs on council. But it’s rare to get reporting on this in places that have become “news deserts.”

But to go back to where I started, it’s been locked in for decades now that slightly more than a third of all eligible voters in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. do not vote and will never vote. If non-voters were a party they would win every election. And that’s at the federal level. On the provincial or municipal level the non-voter party would win landslide majorities. Does this constitute a functional democracy?

If so, I think it’s one that could be improved. In the lead-up to Ontario’s recent provincial election. the Toronto.com website had a poll asking people who seldom or never vote why they don’t vote. 62.5% said their vote wouldn’t make any difference. They are right to be so disillusioned. The three English-speaking jurisdictions I’ve been talking about all use a first-past-the-post electoral system rather than one based on proportional representation. In Germany, which has a proportional representation system, the 2025 general election had a voter turnout of 82.5%, which is the highest since German reunification.

I think proportional representation is a better system, but there’s no chance the political parties will allow it to happen here, as public apathy to it as an issue means there’s no call for change. That non-voting party seems to want to keep their official status of invisibility.