DISCARDED CANDIDATES: Waste as Metaphor in Local Government Elections in Australia (and Elsewhere)

Elections produce legitimacy, relations between representative and represented, and consent to rule. They are also systems of discarding. Representative democracies require a surplus of candidates who engage in practices and rituals of elections, the majority of which are discarded at the ballot box. Candidates (over)invest in their campaigns, resulting in wasted time, money, and materials. Unsuccessful candidates offer a particular vantage point to view the processes of valuing and devaluing in elections, as they transition from the elevated position of candidate to the abject condition of discarded representative. Through orienting lenses of discard studies and the anthropology of waste, I re-examine campaign practices in 2021 local government elections in New South Wales, Australia, and shed light on the experience of being made surplus to representative democracy. Anthropological approaches to care, repair, (Martínez 2017) and “discarding well” (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022) provide alternative ways to re-value so-viewed surplus candidates after election day.