The Absent Vote Pushes Nothing: Pushing Back at the Ballot Box
In electoral systems only those who show up are counted. A community that boycotts the ballot box does not leave the contest; it lets it be decided by others, and against itself.
Editorial board
Nine hundred and seventy-nine votes
On 4 July 2024 Jonathan Ashworth, one of the most prominent figures in the British Labour Party’s shadow cabinet, was waiting for the result in his Leicester constituency. He had represented the seat since 2011, and it was considered one of his party’s safe strongholds. National polls all said his party would sweep the election, and he was expected to be sitting in the cabinet within days.
Labour did sweep the country. But Ashworth lost his seat.
He was defeated by an independent candidate unknown in politics: Shockat Adam, an optometrist from the city’s Muslim community, who campaigned on Labour’s position on the war in Gaza. The margin was just 979 votes.
Adam was not alone. That same night four other independents who had put Gaza at the centre of their campaigns won, three of them in constituencies with many Muslim voters. And Wes Streeting, who went on to become health secretary, survived by just 528 votes against an independent candidate of Palestinian origin.
Nine hundred and seventy-nine votes were enough to change the face of a constituency. Had a thousand of those voters stayed at home, nothing would have changed.
Source: Official UK Parliament results, Leicester South constituency, 4 July 2024.
In modern democracies the ballot box has become the most peaceful and least costly instrument of political pushing back. It needs no weapon and no street, only a slip of paper and a few minutes. But it carries a harsh rule: only those who show up are counted. Politicians of every party know who votes and who stays away, and they draw their priorities on the map of those who are present.
﴿وَلَا تَكْتُمُوا الشَّهَادَةَ ۚ وَمَنْ يَكْتُمْهَا فَإِنَّهُ آثِمٌ قَلْبُهُ﴾[البقرة: 283]
“And do not conceal testimony; whoever conceals it, his heart is sinful.” (Al-Baqarah 2:283)
The verse was revealed in the context of debts and transactions. But a number of contemporary jurists, among them Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta, classified voting as testimony for which the voter will be answerable, and counted abstaining without excuse as concealing it. There is a well-known disagreement on the question, especially regarding Muslims’ participation in elections in non-Muslim countries. Yet the major jurisprudential councils in the West, such as the European Council for Fatwa and Research, concluded that participation is permissible, and even called for, when it wards off harm or brings benefit. That is the very logic of pushing back.
The simple arithmetic of absence
There is no complicated secret to voting. If a community makes up a fifth of a constituency’s population and only half of its eligible members vote, its actual weight becomes a tenth of the votes. If three quarters vote, its weight rises to about a fifth. The difference between the two is not the community’s size but its presence. A candidate who needs a tenth may ignore it; one who needs a fifth cannot.
Elections to Israel’s Knesset offer a clear numerical example for anyone who wants to see the effect of turnout on the representation of an Arab minority. In March 2020 turnout among Arab citizens reached about 65%, and the Joint List won fifteen seats, the highest number in the history of Arab parties there. In November 2022 turnout fell to about 53%, the Arab parties dropped to ten seats, and the Balad party won 2.9% of the vote, failing to clear the 3.25% threshold, so its votes were wasted.
Honesty requires that we not attribute this decline to turnout alone. The Arab parties ran in 2022 split into three lists after having been one, and the split itself dampened enthusiasm and scattered votes. But the lesson stands: boycott and fragmentation work together, and both reduce a community’s weight before a single vote is counted.
From the ballot box to the table
A vote may seem a symbolic matter, but its effect reaches everyday resources. The clearest examples come from outside the Arab world. The American political scientist Andrea Campbell showed in “How Policies Make Citizens” (2003) that older Americans, decades ago the least politically active age group, became from the early 1980s the group that votes most and contacts its representatives most. When the US administration tried in 1981 to cut some Social Security benefits, they flooded Congress with letters until it backed down. Strikingly, the most active among them were the poorest, because their livelihood depended on those benefits.
In Israel itself, when the United Arab List held four decisive seats in the 2021 coalition, the government approved Resolution 550 that October, a five-year plan for economic and social development in Arab society worth close to thirty billion shekels. There is a subtle point here: the effect did not come from the number of seats but from their position in a closely balanced scale. An organised vote at a decisive moment can weigh more than a large, scattered one.
In the United States, New York City announced in March 2015 that Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha would be added to its public school holidays, after years of work by a coalition of Arab and Muslim organisations and after the city’s mayor had made it a campaign promise. A small thing on its face, but it meant that tens of thousands of families no longer had to choose between their faith and their children’s attendance at school.
Where Arabs and Muslims stand today
Surveys by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) indicate that voter registration among eligible American Muslims rose from about 60% in 2016 to about 85% in 2025, matching the rate for Americans in general. But a gap remained in actual voting: in the 2024 election about 80% of registered Muslims said they voted, against about 91% of registered voters overall. These figures are self-reported, and people are known to overstate their voting, but the comparison between groups remains telling.
The gap widens in local elections, where the effect on daily life is closest. In many American cities fewer than a quarter of voters take part in municipal and school board elections. These are the bodies that decide permits for mosques and schools, curricula, police priorities and property taxes. That means a few thousand organised votes can change the condition of a whole neighbourhood. In 2021 the state of Michigan saw the election of the first Arab Muslim mayor of Dearborn and the first city council made up entirely of Muslims in Hamtramck, all the result of organised local presence, not of population size alone.
Boycott: pushing back or withdrawing?
Some argue for boycotting as a protest against candidates who do not represent them, or against a system they do not trust. This argument deserves respect, and in some contexts an organised boycott has been a real instrument of pressure. But its problem in stable electoral systems is that it is silent. In the numbers, someone absent in protest cannot be told apart from someone absent through apathy, and politicians do not read intentions; they read votes. An organised vote, even one cast for a third candidate or a blank ballot where that is counted, is a message that is read and counted.
This article does not call for voting for any particular party. That is a judgment for each voter. What it says is simpler: in electoral contention, the community that is present is negotiated with, and for the community that is absent, others decide.