Voting is boring, and the kids are alright

As the bard sings, ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’ But some number-crunching helps convert apocrypha to facts. And the fact of the matter is, voting is boring, at least for 62% of 18-19-year-olds eligible to vote for the first time. With only 38% of this demographic – about 1.85 cr citizens – having enrolled to vote in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, and the possibility of further attrition not unlikely, it is as much about the nature of the sport of voting as it is about the ‘players’: voters. Like Test cricket, elections are no longer exciting, and certainly not when pitched as ‘duty’ to a teen. And this has been the trend for a while now, considering the 2019 polls saw about 1.5 cr first-time voters, actually 23% less than in this round. If voting was an FMCG sector industry, marketing budgets for this target group would have been slashed with good reason.

Elections now take place amidst far more other attractions than before – much of it happening online on a mobile phone screen. The stretched out 7-phase, 6-week marathon makes it even harder to pitch elections as a celebratory party of democracy, media overkill not helping. Ironically, even as personality cults – of sportspersons, celebrities, politicians – have grown stronger, elections serve only a small part of this function. To show support or admiration, voting is just one option – and the least demonstrative one in an age of hyper-demonstration. Add to this the loosening correlation between political results and the reason for one’s vote – candidates swapping camps, parties pitched against each other finding themselves aligned to each other post-polls, etc – and voting is less ‘participatory’ than believers believe. And smart kids know that.

Issues like merit-based exams, jobs, personal freedom and migration plans bear little bearing to electoral promises or deliveries where life seems only socially-engineered. So, is it all doom and gloom? Not quite, since as anyone who was once 18-19 knows, those eligible to vote for the first time will become older over time, and get into the spirit of things. As the 9% increase in the number of total registered voters from 2019 shows.