Disturbing Exit Polls Show People Bothered To Vote

“It’s unrealistic to expect total elimination of people who have a sense of purpose, even when it comes to something as useless as voting.”

Jerusalem, November 1 – Surveys of people emerging from polling places this Election Day in Israel indicate a disturbing trend, analysts say, one that points to a failure of pessimism to erase the phenomenon of people insisting on placing pointless ballots in envelopes and boxes: they showed up to make their electoral choices despite the manifest futility of the whole exercise.

Initial reports from polling stations in the capital and throughout the country give details of at least several hundred citizens having visited those polling stations and stating, upon exit, to those conducting surveys, that they had cast a ballot for a given party. Experts cautioned against taking the exit polls at face value, since many voters lie to or mislead exit poll-takers. Nevertheless, they warned, the fact that at least two hundred voters have bothered to show up at polling stations means that the hopelessness many had hoped for and expected has not completely vanquished the remaining sense of empowerment or responsibility that some citizens still have.

“All signs point to the possibility that we might never entirely eliminate hope,” acknowledged Election Commission Director Yiush Faust. “Decades of eroding confidence in the political system as a whole, and the electoral process in particular, have not resulted in absolute abandonment of the pretense that anyone’s vote can make a difference. A hardcore group apparently still considers it either necessary, proper, or useful – perhaps even sort of empowering, which is just… bizarre – to vote. That group stands in the way of total despair by the rest of the population. Their sensibilities might prove infectious, and without proper action, we might one day return to the dark times when voter turnout topped sixty percent.”

Other experts disagreed with Faust’s bleak assessment. “It’s unrealistic to expect total elimination of people who have a sense of purpose, even when it comes to something as useless as voting,” argued political analyst Mashteen Beqqir. “The fractured polity, the outsize leverage that extremist factions wield, the instability of governments, the cynical reversals by elected officials, the ‘corrective’ measures that only exacerbate problems, the tendentious and partisan enforcement of laws, the intrusion of politics into law and law enforcement, the almost-ritual repetition of futile election cycles as if this time something meaningful will shift – and yet some people persist in their rose-colored attitude. You can’t change everyone.”

“What we can do,” he added, “is make sure that unhealthy optimism doesn’t spread. We’ll be able to measure that in the upcoming three election cycles over the next two years.”

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