© gabriel melcher

The eccentric Zizek refers to how elevator door buttons work to elucidate his position on the power of political voting. He says that voting for political office is like the open/close door button inside of elevators; you press the button but the door acts on its own time. The button is essentially there to make you feel like you are doing something in the situation. Likewise, voting does not effect the actual political situation but is only there as a symbolic gesture that satisfies nothing more than a ‘sense’ of purpose.

As much as I agree with this sentiment on a foundational level, it is a bit crude. Some elevator open/close door buttons really do seem to respond. Perhaps a more illustrious analogy would be how intersection crosswalks work.

Just like the elevator analogy intersections provide the passerby with a button, which is supposed to be responsive to interaction. At large intersections, with busy traffic for most of the day, these buttons seem so ineffectual that most often when there are three, four, five people waiting to cross the street no one will press it. Rather, they will wait for the light to change on its own. What actually causes the light to change at such an intersection is likely that the light is a ‘smart-light.’ This means that under the road, right where the first vehicle stops for a red there is a sensor. When enough weight presses on this sensor it begins a timer to change the light. So, instead of the light changing because of a pedestrians needs the light changes due to the flow of traffic, a larger process.

This, though is not the case for some smaller intersections, particularly those that have heavy traffic on one axis but not the other. At these lights, one can visually see the effectiveness of pressing the crosswalk button. In these instances it makes sense to have the crosswalk button actually be effective because if the traffic was left up to itself the light would essentially never change to allow for pedestrians to cross.

It is this variability which makes crosswalks a more illuminating analogy for political voting than elevators. Just like the heavy intersections, the presidential campaign is essentially governed by a higher order process than the vote itself and for this reason most don’t even bother to participate. Whereas on the other hand, just like smaller intersections in more localized political voting processes voting takes on effective significance.

- Walter Friederichs