Would a democracy hot dog move enough Americans to vote down a tyrant?

What a cold business is voting by post.

It felt desolate last month, sorting disembodied local council candidates from a soulless written list, filling in a ballot paper on the kitchen table and dropping it without ceremony at the post office.

Remote. Just as it felt in 2020, when, fearful of a virus, we were locked down and the only way to vote for local councillors across Victoria was by mail.

“Democracy sausages” (and fundraising food stalls) are part of Australia’s election days.Credit: Darrian Traynor

No cheery gathering at a local school or town hall. No lining up and chatting merrily to neighbours and strangers. No eyeballing of anxious candidates, nor the secret satisfaction of knowing you wouldn’t vote for some of them no matter how fawningly they grovelled.

More to the point, no sausage.

No sizzle, as my colleague Cara Waters so rightly observed in the lead-up to last week’s dreary local government elections-by-post.

I’ve enjoyed voting days ever since my first, in the federal election of 1972, when I took satisfaction in placing Malcolm Fraser last on the ballot paper for the south-west Victorian electorate of Wannon.

It wasn’t that I disliked Fraser personally, nor that I had any affinity with the other candidates, whose names I have forgotten if I ever knew them.

Why, just a few months before the election Fraser sent me a card to mark my 21st birthday, just as he did for every other young member of his constituency whose birthday turned up on his filing system.

But he’d been minister for the army from 1966 to 1968, when my mates and I were waking up to the wicked waste that was the Vietnam War. We cringed at the obsequious “all the way with LBJ” of the prime minister, Harold Holt, who had appointed Fraser to the job.

A famous view of Malcolm Fraser by The Age cartoonist, the late Ron Tandberg. Credit: The Age

The sealer was that Fraser was elevated to minister for defence from 1969 to 1971. Birthday card or not, he was in charge of conscripting young men my age into the army that could, and did, send them to fight and sometimes die in a senseless war.

I was eligible fodder for conscription under Fraser’s period, and though my marble didn’t come up in the ballot, I was pretty angry about the whole damn thing.

We had to register at the age of 20, yet we didn’t get to vote until we were 21. Old enough to be forced into military uniform by lottery, but not old enough to have any say about it.

A lot of young people like me were straining to vote. We wanted a Gough Whitlam government because Whitlam had promised to withdraw all Australian troops from Vietnam, to end conscription, and to reduce the voting age to 18.

Plus it was plain embarrassing to contemplate waking up the day after the election to discover Australia still had the very silly Billy McMahon as our prime minister.

Gough Whitlam captured the youth vote in 1972. His daughter Cathy wore the slogan of the time when she caught up with her father on the campaign trail.Credit: Fairfax Photographic

And so, when the 1972 election came around, I had my say at the ballot box, even though Fraser by then had quit the defence portfolio after a row with the then PM, John Gorton, and had such a grip on Wannon he’d never lose it, however I might vote.

Still, it felt good lining up on a Saturday morning in a crowd of people passionately wanting a say in their country’s future, whatever that might prove to be, before hurrying to the nearby cake stall set up by the good women of the local school Mothers’ Club, their tables overflowing with delicious sponges and Swiss rolls.

Democracy sausage

You need sustenance for the business of upending a government, and cakes sufficed, for sausages sizzling on newfangled gas barbecues hadn’t yet made an appearance at our polling booths in 1972.

The term “democracy sausage”, it happens, wouldn’t appear as a hashtag on social media until 2010, though it seems now to have been embedded in our culture forever.

Australia’s system of compulsory voting – and the sizzle of snags on a barbie – gets a very high proportion of us engaged in the democratic process, even if that engagement for some is limited to a few weeks or days leading to polling day.

We’ve heard the argument, tired now, that compulsory voting is a form of tyranny. It’s not, whatever libertarians might insist: it’s an elegant way of ensuring almost all of us find ourselves responsible for deciding who will – or will not – govern us for the next three or four years.

Around 90 per cent – and regularly more – of eligible Australians turn out for elections: close to the highest figure in the world.

The obverse is that, not much more than 66 per cent of eligible American voters are likely to participate in the serious business of electing a president (though a record number of early votes have already been cast, it is reported).

One of the candidates is promising to be an actual tyrant, unworthy of leading anything that calls itself a democracy, let alone that advertised as “the world’s greatest democracy”.

It speaks poorly if one in three Americans can’t be bothered to participate in the process that will decide on Tuesday, November 5, whether or not a would-be despot will lead them.

A two-thirds turn-out, as it happens, would be an unusually high one historically – US voter participation sat at not much more than a dismal 50 per cent for most of last century. It soared to a record 66 per cent in 2020, as voters roused themselves enough to elect Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

Would-be despot: Donald Trump campaigning for a return to the White House.Credit: AP

And now?

Would a democracy hot dog help?