What does it mean when a country holds an election and the citizenry, in numbers too large to spin, simply declines to participate? I have been asking this question all weekend, mostly because I asked it Friday night at Eliza Mortenson’s table and nobody wanted to answer it then either.
Eliza had set the long table in her Georgetown dining room for ten — she always sets for ten, even when six have RSVP’d, on the theory that a chair waiting for someone is a more elegant statement than a chair that wasn’t there. The runoff in Iran was Sunday. We were eating Friday. Already, every wire desk in town knew what the turnout would be, because it had been telegraphed for weeks. The question wasn’t whether Tehran would embarrass itself. The question was who at the table was going to say so.
The bipartisan lobbyist — I will only describe him as bipartisan, because that is the only adjective he has earned over the course of four administrations — was seated to my left, examining the stem of his glass with the kind of attention men give to objects when they are deciding not to speak. He had spent the cocktail hour explaining to Eliza’s nephew that what was happening in Iran was “complicated, structurally.” Structurally is the word men in this town use when they have run out of analysis and would like to keep being paid.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has the historian’s habit of making everyone uncomfortable on purpose, said that the regime had stopped publishing precinct-level data three cycles ago, and that the practice of estimating turnout from the parking lots outside mosques was, in her professional opinion, a more reliable methodology than anything the Interior Ministry was prepared to release. Judy said this between bites of the first course. Nobody picked it up.
What I wanted to say — and what I did say, because at a certain age there is no remaining reason not to — was that a runoff election in which the citizenry refuses to show up is not a procedural footnote. It is the loudest thing a population can say while remaining inside the law. The empty booth is a ballot. The unmarked card is a position. The people of Iran on Sunday delivered a verdict on their parliament with the only instrument the regime had left them, which was their absence. The room received this observation the way rooms in Washington always receive observations: by reaching for the bread.
The bipartisan lobbyist eventually offered that of course, of course, low turnout was “concerning,” but that one had to be careful about importing American assumptions about civic participation onto societies with different traditions. I asked him what he thought our own midterm turnout said about our tradition. He said the wine was very good. Eliza said “Margaret, please.” The nephew, to his credit, looked at his plate as if it had betrayed him.
Here is what I keep turning over. We are a country that has spent twenty years lecturing other capitals about the sacredness of the ballot, and we are now well into a stretch where our own most reliable election story is which secretary of state is being sued by which legislature for drawing the maps in the wrong shape. We watch Tehran’s voters refuse the regime’s invitation and we describe it as “complicated, structurally.” We watch our own voters refuse our invitation and we describe it as a turnout problem, as if turnout were weather. Eliza, when pressed, said she preferred not to discuss it at the table. The bipartisan lobbyist agreed. Judy, bless her, asked for the recipe.
The runoff happened Sunday. The boycott happened with it. The dinner happened Friday, and what I will remember about it was not the lamb, which was excellent, but the silence — the long, well-bred, perfectly-set-for-ten silence — of a roomful of people in the capital of a republic who had decided, by unspoken agreement, that the most useful thing to do about an empty polling station six thousand miles away was to compliment the cheese course. We are getting very good at compliments. We are getting worse at everything else.