How do you engage with the political process without voting?
Non-profit organizations, community organizing, contacting elected officials, testifying at legislative hearings, lobbying, education and outreach, studies on policies' impacts on specific populations, civil disobedience, protests, etc., all of which are useful and necessary in an active civic society.
Exactly. There are many political things people can do other than voting. I'm not shy about emailing a federal politician when I think they're doing something wrong (or even when I think they've done something exceptionally right). For example, I've recently sent letters to politicians for both reasons; the former on the issue of changing the anthem to gender-neutral language (my MP is a sexist Reformacon idiot), and the latter to one of the Liberal MPs who voted against his own party's assisted-dying bill because he felt that it's unconstitutional (he's right).
And since I've worked for Elections Canada myself, there are things I know that the average voter doesn't - such as how votes are actually counted, and how to tell if the DRO/poll clerk are doing their jobs correctly. There are a lot of misconceptions people have about the process, and I spent a
lot of time on the CBC.ca comment pages last fall, explaining how the process works and when a poll worker isn't doing things right or giving the voter all the information/options to which they're entitled.
This past election was so incredibly
messy, from the pre-writ advertising (months of an obnoxious TV ad complaining that Justin Trudeau has nice hair) and campaign workers phoning people, to the extremely inadequate training given to the DRO/poll clerk teams (you just don't show up late to work, order Canadian flags removed from polling stations; they're NOT Liberal campaign symbols, or give used ballots to people), to polling stations being advertised as "handicapped accessible" but located on the second floor of a building where the elevator isn't usable without a key that the EC workers don't have.
It's possible, but I think it would tend to be limited to the more purist end of the anarchism. I can't see a huge number of people throwing themselves into extra-electoral activism, but refusing to so much as hold their nose and vote for the lesser evil.
Not sure how it is in your country, but here it's entirely possible for kids to participate in campaigning and helping out by distributing flyers, and many schools have "mock elections" where they discuss the issues and hold a mock election to teach the kids how the process works. My own junior high social studies teacher had us doing stuff like this and so much more... when there was a dam controversy going on back in the '70s, our class took a field trip to the sites where the dam could possibly be built and interviewed people living around there... people whose land would be flooded and go from productive land to underwater. Later on, we attended the public hearings and my teacher and even some of the students made presentations. The media spun it as "blue jeans and bubblegum day at the environmental hearings" and thought it was sooo cute that a bunch of 11-13-year-old kids would take an interest and that we were "obviously" influenced by our parents' opinions. Well, this was of course rebutted in the newspaper, as the fact was that most of our parents weren't really aware that this was even an issue. None of them were affected by the dam, so why bother about it?. It was quite a learning experience for me, and I know I'm not the only person in that class who continued with an interest in politics to this day.
There are a lot of immigrants in this country, not to mention the Syrian refugees we took in last winter. Some of these people are very interested in politics, as of course they want to help the party that's most likely to help them and the families left behind. They can't vote until they get their citizenship - a process that will take years - but they are quite willing and able to help candidates, and do whatever other things people do - write letters, sign petitions, attend public meetings, participate in rallies, and so on.
Voting isn't the only thing people can do, and it's a misconception to assume that people don't vote because they don't want to. Sometimes they really do want to vote but don't meet the eligibility requirements.
