If you define majority as 50%+1, and minority as 50%-1, almost all democracies in the world have the minority in the power (unless they get 100% turn out rate with all votes contributing to parliamentary seats). Winning 60% of votes with a turn out of 70% voters is only 42% of the population.
Nah, people staying home on polling day doesn't stop them from being part of the majority opinion. If an option gets 60% of the vote, and there are no shenanigans going on, then that option is almost certainly the choice of the majority.
That's a pretty flexible definition of "choice" ;)
Does this also hold if the vote went 51% to 49% (in dual party system)?
Democracy is there to allow us to express a preference. Not voting is exactly that, a preference to not vote, and reasons are certainly various (including the one you mention of supporting the likely winner).
> That's a pretty flexible definition of "choice" ;)
If you choose not to vote, you're putting endorsement toward what everyone else does. If nothing particularly weird or bad is going on, the people not voting should be similar to the people voting.
And you can pretend I said "preference" if you don't like the word choice. Doesn't change my argument.
> Does this also hold if the vote went 51% to 49% (in dual party system)?
No, statistically that's too close. But when you get 60% of a 70% turnout, to reverse that the rest of the population would have prefer to vote about 3:1 in the opposite direction. That's not likely.
>However, despite waging a campaign of terror against their opponents, the Nazis only tallied 43.9 percent of the vote on their own, well short of a majority to govern alone.
