Waking Sleeping Beauty with democracy's kiss

And a major delight of referendum day will be - should be - the very act of voting itself. The polling place will be the place to be.

I have always been a vigorous opponent of early, premature, half-cocked absentee voting (while excusing those voters unable to go to a polling place because they are infirm or work in Antarctica).

But in opposing early voting I have sometimes stumbled and mumbled when trying to express quite why it seems so sacredly democratically important for us to gird up our loins and gambol out to vote on voting days.

Now to my assistance with this cause, up gallops articulate political scientist Emilee Booth Chapman.

To Aeon magazine she has just contributed an essay titled Voting In Person Brings Democracy To Momentous Life, and although she is an American, heaps of what she has to say applies to us.

And just to set the context, the deplorable trend to early, absentee voting really has a vigorous wriggle-on in Australia.

In 2019, early votes including pre-poll and postal votes constituted 40 per cent of all ballots cast. At this year's federal election almost half of all votes were cast before election day. This year's phenomenon had something to do with fears of teeming polling places being COVID super-spreader venues. Also, though, according to The Guardian, early voting was much resorted to by voters being "sick of" a long (long for them, poor, stamina-lacking petals!) six-week election campaign.

Professor Chapman's own nation's trend away from in-person on-the-day voting on election days dismays her. At the 2020 presidential election, two-thirds of votes were cast prior to election day. This just won't do, she grieves.

"Elections ... shape citizens' attitudes toward democracy and their role within it," she insists.

And for these shapings "the experience of voting and the optics of elections matter a great deal", she's sure.

"In today's democracies, people expect the majority of their fellow citizens to vote, and wonder what has gone wrong when they don't ... and occasions for voting are momentous.

"They create a rhythm to political life in which the ordinary, delegated and diffuse business of politics is punctuated by extraordinary moments of mass participation. Rituals of voting, such as congregating at a local polling place, reinforce the momentousness of the occasion for those who participate in and witness it. Democracy is always something that we do with others."

"The political theorist Dennis F Thompson has argued that when people go to the polls en masse, 'visibly and publicly participating in the same way in a common experience of civic engagement, they demonstrate their willingness to contribute on equal terms to the democratic process'."

Some people, Professor Chapman continues, "might be inclined to dismiss the value of these images and expressions as abstract and immaterial".

"But that would be a mistake. We humans are embodied, sensory creatures, and our environment affects how we think and feel and behave. Many people feel calmer when surrounded by nature, or run faster when listening to upbeat music.

"This kind of environmental sensitivity applies to politics, too. Research [has found] that while excessive waiting at the polls can be irritating, moderately long lines can make the polling place seem like 'the place to be'."

The professor is surely right about all of these things.

On the matter of what she calls "the experience of voting", methinks I couldn't have felt fully, properly engaged with the "momentous" experience of voting on Saturday May 21 to overthrow the malignant Morrison government if I hadn't embraced the election day's momentous rituals of going out to vote.

Voting early, prematurely, remotely, academically, dispassionately would no more have satisfied me than it would have somehow satisfied the Handsome Prince to only virtually plant, using his iPhone, a virtual, early, remote, absentee kiss on the alas cold and only virtual and algorithm-generated cheek of Sleeping Beauty. Would an absentee kiss have had the power to wake her? Surely not.

No, some momentous things in life must be done in what the professor calls an "embodied, sensory" way, and voting in referendums and elections (especially in 2022's election, with voting aimed at waking the nation from a curse-inflicted sleep, nine years of conservative government, not unlike the tragic coma inflicted on Sleeping Beauty by the Evil Fairy) is one of those momentous things.

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