Berkley Center

Today when I asked an Ecuadorian friend if we could make plans for the weekend, he shook his head and told me it would be difficult. “This weekend the ley seca [literally,“dry law”] goes into effect because of elections,” he said. “Everything will be closed.”

My friend was referring to the mayoral elections that are coming up in Quito and in other cities all over the country. In Ecuador, it’s compulsory for all adult citizens ages 18 to 65 to participate in elections. The only exception is made for the illiterate, which the CIA World Factbook indicates includes about 10 percent of the country’s population. Either way, polls will be bustling this Sunday, and liquor stores will be packed by Friday because in addition to compulsory voting, Ecuador has the ley seca, which prohibits the sale, distribution, and consumption of alcohol from 36 hours before polling starts to 12 hours after votes are processed. The idea is to ensure that voters are sober when they cast their ballots. It is no wonder that my friend doubts that anything fun will be happening this weekend. Voting in Ecuador is serious stuff.

Though a young college student could ponder the fairness of this mini-prohibition, what strikes me most about these voting laws is how they reflect the state of democracy in Ecuador.

“Democracy” is a buzzword in Latin America because so many journalists, academics, and politicians cannot agree on whether it exists in its true form in this region of the world. The tendency for democratically elected leaders to centralize power and champion authoritarian policies is just one reason why democracies are “grayer” in Latin America. If you add high levels of corruption and limited freedom of expression to that mix, you get an even better idea of why people are hesitant to label a country like Ecuador as a true-blue democracy.

At the same time, there are parts of the Ecuadorian democratic system that highlight weaknesses in the US system. In the US 2012 presidential elections, the Center for the Study of the American Electorate reported that the voter turnout rate had steadily decreased since 2004. At its height in 2008, 62.3 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. In 2012, this number decreased to 57.5 percent. This is nothing to be proud of. The fact that over 40 percent of our country had absolutely no say in the election of our current president is quite shocking. I cannot imagine what these numbers look like in local and congressional elections, which are of a considerably smaller scale. If the point of a democratic republic is to give a whole population the ability to elect its government and influence decision-making, the US government lacks the voice of a huge portion of the country.

We criticize countries like Ecuador for missing crucial components of a true democracy, but this election period has got me thinking about things that we need to work on in the United States. Ecuador obliges its citizens to vote, but at least it is closer to a true democracy in terms of electoral participation. The integrity of compulsory voting may be questionable, but at the very least, the numbers show that Americans are not saints when it comes to upholding the sacred democratic civil society.

In addition to this, I would like to add a comment on this topic relevant to international relations. It is no secret that the United States poses as the global exporter of democracy, but perhaps Washington needs to look internally—at voter apathy, at the decline of civil society and political activism—to see that our democracy is not perfect. If democratization is a keystone in our foreign policy, don’t we have the responsibility to make sure it works at home before we force it upon others?