disenfranchise

v : deprive of voting rights [syn: disfranchise] [ant: enfranchise]

In a Sunday front page article entitled "Many fear Iraqi vote escalated the violence" Hannah Allam (of the Philadelphia Inquirer's Foreign Staff) claims that Iraqis have been disenfranchised:

When the ballots were collected, about 58 percent of eligible voters had made it to the polls. Among the remaining 42 percent were most Sunni Arabs, who stayed away because of a boycott or the fear of insurgent retaliation. Now, the Sunnis' 20 percent of the population is grossly underrepresented in the government.

Insurgent leaders immediately seized on the Sunni disenfranchisement. They stirred up sectarian emotions with a propaganda campaign that focused not only on the sidelining of Sunnis, but also on their replacement at the head of government by Shiites with close ties to archenemy Iran.

But I am a bit troubled by the word "disenfranchisement." It's increasingly used as code language -- not for people who've had their voting rights taken away (which is what the word means), but for people who simply don't vote.

Now, we can argue that the Sunnis who were too intimidated to vote were effectively disenfranchised. Fearing for your life is more intimidating than long lines in Ohio (even though the latter has been called disenfranchisement).

But is boycotting an election disenfranchisement? To vote or not vote is a certainly a choice, and boycotting the elections is a form of protest which may ultimately be of benefit to people who would have lost anyway or who don't believe in the legitimacy of elections. However, when you have the right to vote, and deliberately decide not to exercise it, I'd say that is precisely the opposite of disenfranchisement. To not do something you have a right to do is one way of exercising that right. Free speech does not give me any obligation to say anything; refraining from speech is one way of exercising it. And not owning a gun (when gun ownership is a right) is an exercise of one's Second Amendment right to own guns.

Why would this writer call people who deliberately refrain from voting "disenfranchised"? To provide food for bloggers like me?

It's bad enough that many people would reading this story uncritically, and would just let the word "disenfranchisement" sink into their brains without engaging in any critical thinking. That's why I blog. But even when the word is misused to describe deliberate non-voting protesters, a far more important point is lost -- and that bothers me much more.

I'm sure it's obvious to most bloggers, but I'll spell it out anyway. The word "disenfranchise" means losing a preexisting right to vote, does it not?

When did the Iraqis finally obtain this right? Wasn't it this year that they were in fact newly enfranchised?

The word "disenfranchisement" refers to the deprival of a preexisting right. Considering that there was no preexisting right, isn't the use of the word "disenfranchisement" in the context of new elections a little disingenuous?

I think so, unless the assumption is that somehow the purpose of the Iraqi elections was to disenfranchise the voters.

But if that was the goal, wouldn't it have been a better idea not to hold elections?