HE RECENT ELECTION has already produced a bumper crop of questions about how to improve the process, including: Will a machine count or a hand count give the most accurate tally? Does the Electoral College distort the true will of the American people? Should we have more federal control to avoid having presidential elections turn on decisions by local officials, often with strong partisan ties, who interpret a welter of differing, often ambiguous, local laws?
Useful as they are, such questions should not obscure a far larger problem that does much more than a confusing ballot to keep elections from reflecting the people's will.
Put bluntly, it is impossible to gain a true picture of the public's wishes from an election in which only half of the citizens cast a ballot, and large groups - Hispanics, younger Americans, poor people, and those with less than a high school education - vote at barely half the rate of whites, retired people, the well-to-do, and college graduates.
Although Americans vote much less than citizens in virtually any other advanced democracy, some observers prefer the current situation. Conservative Paul Weyrich admits: ''I don't want everyone to vote. Our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down.'' Clearly, however, what is good for democracy is not simply whatever happens to favor either conservatives or liberals.
Charlie Reese of the Orlando Sentinel praises the status quo for a different reason: ''The idea that there is some benefit in having ignoramuses and morons pulling levers next to names on a ballot is one of the evil myths of post-modern America.'' Reese is correct that nonvoters tend to be less informed and less educated than the average American.
But it does not follow that encouraging more people to vote harms the quality of government. If it did, one would expect to find the least enlightened public policies in such states as Minnesota and Wisconsin, where voting rates are much higher than average. In fact, the reverse is true according to almost all measures of income and social well-being. Democracy works best where all citizens have an equal chance to influence their government.
A more pervasive reason for ignoring low voting rates is the common impression that no great harm is done so long as enough people vote to keep politicians reasonably responsive to public opinion. This is palpably incorrect. Political apathy and low voting rates have a lot to do with much that Americans most dislike about government.
Low turnouts help to polarize American politics because zealots are more likely to continue voting while middle-of-the-road Americans stay home. Political apathy causes news media to resort to more and more sensational coverage in an effort to retain their audiences. It also tempts candidates to use negative attack ads to discourage supporters of opposing candidates from voting. Apathy helps special interests by preventing groups from mobilizing strong opposition against efforts to pass self-serving legislation and buy influence through campaign contributions.
Finally, a low turnout severely disadvantages poor and working class Americans because they vote so much less than their more affluent, better educated fellow citizens. It is no accident that America's policies to reduce poverty and protect employee interests are consistently weaker than those of other advanced democracies where high school dropouts vote almost as frequently as university graduates.
Even those who agree that voter apathy is unfortunate often believe that nothing much can be done to change the behavior of millions of politically inert Americans. What these pessimists ignore is how much less we do than in previous generations to build citizenship and encourage political participation.
In recent decades, civic education in the schools has steadily lost ground to efforts to prepare the workforce for the 21st century. Few colleges continue to make the preparation of citizens an explicit aim, although it was the principal purpose of liberal education as late as 1950.
Newspapers and television producers have been giving less and less space and time to government and politics, while the government allocates far less money to public affairs programming than other leading democracies. Political parties no longer work as hard to register voters.
In fact, a wide variety of measures are available to increase political participation, ranging from improved civic education to same-day registration. There is nothing inevitable about low voting rates. Participation in national elections exceeds 80 percent in many countries. Among Americans over 65, even high school dropouts vote at rates above 60 percent. The principal reason for the nation's anemic turnout is not that Americans are incurably cynical and apathetic about government.
The reason is that we have failed to mobilize the full array of available remedies to improve the situation. It is time we did, if we are serious about making our elections reflect the wishes of the American people.
Derek Bok is president emeritus of Harvard University and author of the forthcoming book ''The Trouble with Government.''
