Hold It! Don't Get Out the Vote

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.