Yesterday was election day in a few places around the country. Once again you could hear the media decry "low voter turnout".  I saw one comparison made between the 60% voter turnout in Iraq (where people "risked their lives to vote") and the 40% voter turnout in Virginia. 

Is this comparison fair?  What does it really say? 

I posit that low voter turnout is a sign of a healthy democracy.  In a two-party system (why the two party system is stable is a topic for another day), an election will produce two candidates.  For any given political issue, a "spectrum", or range of opinion exists.  Consider a spectrum of opinion on one issue that runs from "far left" to "far right" (which are arbitrary labels).  The distribution of voters along this spectrum is likely to be Gaussian.  The candidates, wishing to attract the most voters, will try to be as close to the peak of the Gaussian as possible.  So the two party system will generate two candidates who are close to the center of public opinion.  If the system is perfect (i.e. the will of the voter is known perfectly, the opinion distribution is never bimodal, etc.) then it will generate two candidates who are identical, and voter turnout will tend to zero, since there is no difference between the candidates. 

Therefore low voter turnout should be seen as a sign of a healthy democracy, while high voter turnout should be seen as a sign of instability.  In societies in turmoil, the opinions of the voters are often not known, and the spectrum of opinions is very broad and may also not be represented by a single Gaussian.  There are often large differences between the candidates, and voter turnout is high.  In our society, some issues are probably bimodal (i.e. pro-life vs. pro-choice) and others have discrete rather than continuous spectra (e.g. referendum issues where the vote is "yes" or "no").  These necessarily result in some differences between the candidates, so voter turnout is still finite (but low).

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