One Household One Vote

I often forget the value of a vote. Growing up in Costa Rica, it was common to hear that around one-third of the electorate would choose not to vote. For a country where a president needs just 40% of the vote, getting people to go to the urns was vital to winning an election.

I did always vote when I was there. But after a decade outside of Costa Rica, my knowledge of its politics and what matters to the country starts to become too abstract to cast something as solid as a vote. Something else has become very clear: How come I keep paying and I still cannot vote for anyone where I live?

Taxed and unrepresented for a decade

Voting is something that stays in my mind, though. Since leaving Costa Rica, I have been unable to vote in local elections. I have lived in cities in which 50% of the population was migrant and was barred from voting. This bears repeating: there are cities in this world that prevent the (almost) majority of their residents from casting a vote to decide what policies should be pushed through or not. And I mean, this was Zurich in the late 2010s, not the US American South in the 1850s. I was, at least, legally not a slave. However, I did understand the "taxation without representation" argument very well.

Loyalty

We often forget what voting means. People are often loyal to a political party. My grandparents used to be. They knew the party's founder, and despite the corruption and the proven track record of unethical behavior, they would still vote for the party of the person who abolished Costa Rica's army.

I am not loyal that way, but I tend to be quite fixed in my ideas. I find that values are of the utmost importance. For example, while living in Zurich, I was sent the picture below in the mail. This was a referendum that would help the country evict migrants who break even minor laws. For example, had the policy passed and I smoked weed (a not punished but illegal offense in CH), I could have been sent packing.

Voice

This was a very loaded example. And if you are not a migrant, you might not understand this meaning. Imagine you live in a city, and you do your best to contribute to it. You might be able to vote, but you are pushing to jump all the hoops and maybe one day become a voter. And then this initiative comes along.

You want to yell, but there is no one to listen. Indeed, the party that pushed this regulation is the biggest political party in the land. It was also highly successful. Years prior, it had managed to put quotas on the number of Europeans who could come to work in Switzerland and pass the initiative I presented before.

Bitter

If you were like me, you would not even know many voters in a real way. Swiss people do not mix so well with foreigners. Only after a decade or so do friendships start to develop. From my eight years, my only Swiss friend was the husband of a very close (migrant) friend of mine. He was great, but I only met her because of her.

You get dark. I started to fear the idea of having children before emigrating. What if my children, god forbid, become Swiss? I started to create plans. Maybe we could travel the world to show them that Switzerland is not normal. Maybe I could try to spend every second preventing them from acting like their friends? It took a while until I realized the stupidity of my ideas. And well, as Hirschman would say, I was left with one alternative...

Exit

I left; I took my value-creating and tax-paying self away and emigrated to another land. Note that Swiss people being Swiss was not the only reason I left. But it is a very good ex-post facto rationalization of my bad gut feeling while in the land of cheese and chocolate.

Exit is a great strategy, but it requires one to start again. Clocks are reset. My chances of voting for a representative wind down, and I push my influence in local policies even further in the future.

Vote

Believe or not, this post is not a rant against the Swiss SVP. But one against being unrepresented while paying taxes. The policy I shared above would never happen if every Swiss taxpayer could influence elections. The biggest political party would never send racist pamphlets to everyone's mail if we could all vote. There is only one reason: my loyalty waned, my voice was unheard, my bitterness emerged, and I left Switzerland. I could not vote. The majority of Zurich taxpayers could not vote, and the people who could vote, believed in the policies of the SVP.

Behind a Vote

A vote is not a vote. It is a stamp of approval, a mandate to act, a signal of values. When you vote, you choose a political party's vision of the future and step away from the futures the other parties put forth. You agree that a politician's standpoints are the best possible world you could imagine—or at least a better one than the others would create.

If you vote for SVP in Switzerland, you directly bankroll racism. The same is true for many countries. As Ibrahim X Kendi would explain, policies are racist or anti-racist. There is no in-between. If a policy does not aim at removing and dismantling power structures built on race or country of origin, I may add, then they are racist. Therefore, if the political party that you freely choose to vote for espouses racist policies. Then you are...

Racist

I don't want to enrage you. We are all racist in some way or another. In some ways, racism is a spectrum with few rich people at the lower end of the spectrum and zero poor, racially disenfranchised people at the higher end of the spectrum. For example, some people have never been sexually attracted to people of a different race. A clear sign of racism. These people, though, are obviously less racist than the ones who voted in favor of the Ausschaffung krimineller Ausländer referendum I discussed above.

Although there is a spectrum of racism, its true power lies in its structures and its hierarchical design. The fact that a person who pays taxes in a country is not allowed to vote is not technically racist, but it is effectually racist. I still feel the racism inherent in my lack of political representation today.

Household

My household consists of three people. Only one of us can vote—I might soon, as our child is 15 years old. This is, in my opinion, wrong. I believe in the "one person, one vote" doctrine. Every resident of a country should be allowed to vote. Be them refugees, taxpayers, retirees, or babies. Everyone should be given a vote.

If my household gave three votes. The German Racist Party (GRD, translated AfD in German) would not be meeting to consider the dream of shipping me, my wife, and my child to some non-existent colony abroad. Had we three votes, they would not dare. 40% of German children migrated themselves (20%) or had at least one parent who is a migrant. Furthermore, it is only for people over 55 years of age that the proportion of migrants goes below 1/4! (see here).

The one-person-one-vote doctrine would improve other aspects of our lives as well. If our children could vote, tax money would be spent on creating policies that would enhance the lives of children and parents. The scarcity of daycare opportunities would end, and other policies we cannot afford today (e.g., fully paid parental leave) could appear.

The crucial side effect of all this is that if our child could vote, more parents might be inclined to have a second or third child and keep the population stable. This last fact is the cornerstone upon which any form of good retirement policy is built. In the absence of children and working-age people, retirement must be pushed even later or decreased dramatically. Thus, a one-person-one-vote doctrine might even help old people have a better life, not just children, parents, and migrants.

CODA

I hate being bitter. I grew up an engineer. I love solving problems and creating naive solutions to complex problems. My kryptonite is a simple problem for which people build complex solutions. The integration of migrant populations is one such problem. While taxed and unrepresented, migrants are faced with the same spiral of disenfranchisement that led me to leave Switzerland.

I firmly believe that a one-person-one-vote doctrine could help mitigate many of the problems of integration our societies face today. A simple solution to a highly complex problem, why not try it out?