Having 70-80-90% participation with non-compulsory voting should be the goal of any self respecting democracy and politicians who reject measures to increase voter turnout should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
Not really: Voters can still choose to "not participate" (whether as protest or laziness) simply by casting a ballot that is functionally empty of choices.
If anything, the signal you're talking about becomes stronger, since a compulsory-voting system removes or reduces certain practical impediments which have nothing to do with deliberate protest.
The signals are different. I cast a blank vote to indicate my support for the process/election, but my lack of support for any of the candidates. I cast no vote to indicate my lack of support for the process itself.
Non-voters and blank/invalid voters are usually reported separately to give exactly these 2 signals.
Total utter rubbish.
Australia has compulsory voting .. meaning 98% of people turn up or mail in a "vote" and have a barbeque on the day.
The "signal" you falsely claim to be missing is right there in the donkey votes and duds - anybody that objects to the candidates presented is free to draw a dick and balls on the ballot or pencil in a candidate of their choice .. and that signal is anonymous, counted and logged.
You are missing the point. It's not about objecting to candidates. It's two separate signals sent by on the one hand abstaining, and on the other hand filling out a blank votes.
Blank vote means "I think this is a legitimate election, I just don't like any of the candidates".
The distinction between these two signals is important enough that most democracies around the world preserve it by not having compulsory voting.
The US has a long history of voter suppression, which is often supported by the remaining voters. There's a lot of court cases about it; states will fight hard to reduce the impact of the ""wrong kind"" of voters.
Australia has compulsory voting and retains this: the legal req is to show up and get your name marked off.
If you wish to communicate your dissatisfaction with the available candidates, then you then fill out your ballot with a giant penis and go on your merry way.
To play devil's advocate and to argue for compulsory voting for a moment, however: It is a potential antidote to the type of voter apathy by which a somewhat demoralized but popular party (e.g. Democrats in the last US election) put themselves out of power by not being as motivated as a smaller group.
So while knowing the width of the motivation gap is useful, a polity could also just compel everyone to vote and then ask if they would have done so if not compelled, to get that information. Which is worse: Inaccurate data about voters' excitement, or sudden and surprising political shifts because people were sure they didn't need to go out to vote because they assumed their party had the majority?
Without compulsory voting, only those with strong motivation will vote - and there is no guarantee that an outsized motivation on one extreme side of the spectrum will not drastically and surprisingly take over if most people felt safe staying home. Austria right now seems to be a good example.
Put simply, the effort to become a voter should be equal regardless of wealth. I like the idea of imposing the difficulty the minority poors have in getting an ID on the white better off. Can you imagine Musk having to make multiple in-person trips to the DMV and wait an hour each time he is there?
Better then to vote for yourself, vote blank, vote for whoever you would rather have in charge, or vote for the least bad.
Not voting can be dissent (I disagree with the process, I don't think it's fair etc) or simply apathy. But in either case it gives less legitimacy to whoever is elected. And that's important: if you don't think it's a fair election/process then you don't want to give the legitimacy.
If you get killed on the high ground, you’re still dead.
Why on earth would you prefer a signal of legitimacy over 70/80/90% vote participation? Get people engaged.
(It's far from the only reason states don't use compulsory voting, I should say. There are many reasons both to have compulsory voting, and many arguments against. But the fact I was trying to point to was that the vast majority of countries don't use mandatory voting - because, one must assume, they feel the cons outweigh the pros)
"There are many reasons both to have gerrymander and not have gerrymander. The USA has gerrymander, because, one must assume, the USA feels the pros outweigh the cons."
Countries don't make the laws. They delegate that job to politicians. It should come as no surprise that even for an obviously anti-democratic practice like gerrymander, politicians get away with adding laws that favour them personally over democracy.
As for the arguments on www.idea.int, they say the leading one is "the leading argument against compulsory voting is that it is not consistent with the freedom associated with democracy". It's a circular argument. You don't have complete freedom under democracy, and there is no definitive list of freedoms democracy does give you. It varies from country to country. In some countries you don't have the freedom to not vote. So the argument made is really: "the leading argument against compulsory voting is that it is not consistent with the freedom associated with definition of democracy I just made up".
The other argument they raise is "random votes". True, there are random votes - 7.3% according to them. But that 7.3% is swamped by the 40% of additional voters in the USA who vote if you had compulsory voting. Besides, I'm suspicious of that 7.3% figure. In Australia we measure these things as best we can, and the figure is 1% .. 2%. Informal votes are around 5%, which if you add them together does bring the total to 7%. A vote is counted as informal votes when it's impossible to determine the voters intentions. Some are deliberate protests, but it seems most are just mistakes. In any case, they aren't "random votes" and don't effect the outcome directly so the 7.3% figure is misleading.
I've never head an Australian (where we do have compulsory voting) make what www.idea.int says is the leading argument for compulsory voting, which is that "decisions made by democratically elected governments are more legitimate when higher". Again, since I've never seen a solid definition of "legitimately elected government", I suspect it also suffers from the "definition I just made up" problem. I fact I've never heard anyone make any of the arguments on www.idea.int's list.
What Australians do say is it makes detecting many types of voting fraud easier, because it becomes trivially easy to check people votes just once: count the votes. Because detecting voting fraud is easy, there are no stringent ID checks. You just turn up, no ID required, get your name crossed off the electoral roll, get your ballot paper and vote (or not). So it in compulsory effect makes it easier to cast a vote. It also makes voter disenfranchisement much harder for a pollie to pull off, because people start yelling loudly if they cop a fine because someone makes it near impossible. Surprise, surprise, disenfranchisement is common in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... It's not a thing in Australia.
Those are clear and obvious effects. A debatable one that I think is true is it pulls the vote toward the centre. The people pushing for extreme views always vote because they want things to change. Those that are happy with things as they are sometimes assume it will continue if they do nothing.
In fact, in the UK the polling staff are told that they need to assess the competence of the person voting ahead of time and that the person voting must do so alone and without duress, else they should not permit the vote to be accepted.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/...
> You’ll talk to voters as they arrive and make sure they know what to do.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/p...
> The role of polling station staff is to ensure that voters are able to cast their vote in secret, free from influence and in a calm atmosphere.
Yes a real person voted. But no they did not have any clue what they were doing when they did.
(My response was: That security guard should get a raise; you really need more minimum wage employees who care that much about the company /s)
But the only punishment you get for not voting is at most a small fine and that you have to jump through some hoops to get on the register of voters again. But it seems to work in practice to get people to turn out.
Lot of great people of average intelligence. They should not be trying to involve themselves in governance. There should be no expectation or need that they get involved. Average people make poor decisions vs the unusually intelligent. Political discourse should elevate, not mean-regress.
The magic of voting is that most people vote for a side in a semi-random manner and cancel each other out harmlessly.
Have you ever heard people say, when government policies transfer wealth from the young to the old, that it's because young voters have low voting rates while old voters have high voting rates?
If you believe politicians will naturally favour the interests of demographics who vote, then having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society.
(Not that it's worked flawlessly for Australia, I'll admit)
The logical endgame of that approach is to have a big tug-of-war between two big coalitions struggling to steal stuff off the other (which, in fairness, is a pretty common equilibrium in democracies).
That actually goes right to the heart of the issue - you can't get a just society by doing things by the numbers. To get a just society, just policies need to be implemented. If the winning side of an election wants just policies then there will be a just society. Otherwise society will be injust. Participation doesn't change the dynamics of that at all - if anything it makes it harder because the majority is generally an unprincipled blob and certainly does not make time to reflect on matters of fairness (Australia is hardly a just society, simply that the people getting a bad deal are relatively small minorities, not actively mistreated and can be reasonably ignored). If we had a reliable process for achieving a just society we'd use that instead of democracy.
...why just two? He specifically mentioned advocating for ranked choice voting, which would make it a tug-of-war between N coalitions, and would lead to better outcomes that our current broken two-party system.
And if N coalitions playing tug-of-war, that means there is an (N-1)/N chance that your preferred one loses. It is much better if everyone agrees not to play that game and adopts smarter strategy. Which has little to do with the number of people participating in the election.
But it doesn't solve this particular issue.
The whole population is aging. Which means we're going to see higher and higher percentage of old people vs young people. Now what? We demand higher turnover rates from the young to cancel it out?
Either way, encouraging stupid people to participate is not the way. At best it is a harmless no-change manoeuvre.
If it’s not people who study policy as a hobby, then who ought to be voting?
I think that Gilens 2005[1] and Gilens 2014[2] are the references that people usually cite to argue that America is an oligarchy. The 2nd paper made a splash at the time, see for example this summary[3]. There were some attempts at rebuttals that seemed silly even back then, but regardless of what you think about the argument 1 or 2 decades ago, wealth concentration has accelerated, so.. hmm.
If voting has little chance of winning you your policy preferences even when you do get your preferred candidate, there is little good that may come of it but many potential negatives such as: junk mail, jury duty, the smoldering eternal hatred of your differently aligned friends/family, drafted into the coming great space war, etc
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3521574 [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
You'd have to be a dogmatic believer of civic duty to stand in line for hour just to vote R or D in a state that will go the other way with 30% difference...
What the prior commenter meant is that in some jurisdictions it's pointless to vote against one of the parties because they win so overwhelmingly.
For example, I live in Massachusetts. The legislature is 95% one party. There's no point in being in another party, you'll never get elected and your vote won't change the outcome. It sounds like a dream if it's "your" party but without inter-party tension there are a lot of shenanigans that go on.
Your municipal and state elections are, by a wide margin, the most consequential to your daily life. Congressional representatives have a moderate importance.
Who is elected president has the least impact to your daily life, and to the laws and politics of the country, of any person you ever vote for. It's actually tiny, even if some people would like you to think it's everything.
Gerrymandering is a cancer on our democracy. Unfortunately it is self perpetuating.
The problem is that it's also "what point is there in voting D in California?"
All this great shit the D's talk about never seems to manifest in the states they solidly control.
(Also, if you're hung up on the fact I'm bagging on the home team, that's just the state the parent poster mentioned, mentally invert R and D and substitute a southern state).
The fact that Jeff Atwood can make $8 million in political donations just underlines the fact that I am powerless compared to him. We may have equal say on election day, but people like Atwood have vastly disproportionatal say on legislation days. Putting money into politics is the problem, not the solution to the problem.
If the "American Dream", according to Jeff Atwood, is to become much wealthier than one's fellows, that's inherently anti-democratic.
There was a lot of Musk/Thiel billions here, Kamala spending surge there, George Clooney, Taylor Swift.
(And now this guy who will spend more millions)
Wasn't the intention that you could not buy a democratic election?
The real winners here must be Ad providers (google/facebook) and television networks.
"Programmers all over the world helped make an American Dream happen in 2008 when we built Stack Overflow"
"I was rewarded handsomely for a combination of hard work and good luck. That's what the American Dream promises us."
"I earned millions of dollars. I thought that was the final part of the American Dream." [He goes on to talk the final part as "sharing" the American Dream, but I question why earning millions of dollars is the first part, or indeed any part, of the American Dream.]
"It was only after I attained the dream that I was able to fully see how many Americans have so very little. This much wealth starts to unintentionally distance my family from other Americans."
"I grew up poor in America, inspired by the promise of the American Dream that I could better myself and my family"
In other words, Atwood is committed in principle to a system of inequality, despite complaining about the current historic levels of inequality. One wonders, what level of inequality would be acceptable to him? Atwood started making political posts only after Trump was elected, but wealth concentration was already a huge problem before then.
Moreover, Atwood's only "solutions" to our problems seem to be charity from the ultra-wealthy and voter turnout. Implicitly, he appears to be blaming people poorer than him for our problems, for not voting "correctly", or not voting at all, as if there were anyone to vote for who would do anything about wealth inequality. Certainly not Harris, financially backed by a bunch of billionaires herself who were essentially writing her policies along with their checks to her campaign.
A system that relies essentially on charity, especially on the charity of the ultra-wealthy, is fundamentally dysfunctional, broken. Charity should not be necessary if the government does what it's supposed to do and protects its citizens. I'm not impressed by philanthropy, because the need for it is already a sign that something is very wrong. It presumes a system that disproportionately benefits a few and impoverishes many, perhaps just so that the philanthropists can feel good about themselves.
I mean... is the definition of "everyone" really up for debate? 60% is only a little more than half
You can debate why turnout is so low in this country for something so high stakes. The obvious things to reach for are the electoral college (where votes simply don't matter unless you live in a swing state) and the two party "system" (where you have to vote for an omnibus which will definitely have things you disagree with).
But it's just plain rotten. The only people this seems to work for consistently are the wealthy.
Well, that's because they know how to invest wisely in lawmakers. Fabulous ROI.
maybe it's good when you are at that level. Jeff and Elon both spent a ridiculous amount, but arguably smart money like the Koch brothers are just making nice influence campaigns with a lot less, and of course the same goes for state-level actors.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
Maybe because statistically speaking your individual vote does not in fact matter? And that's a principle that applies equally to the left/right. For every marginal non-voter in your preferred party you get to vote, there's a marginal non-voter in the opposite party that somebody else is trying to get out to vote.
Put another way, we could intentionally reduce the sample size and mandate that only 33% of adults vote in any given election, and we'd reduce the statistical confidence in the election result very little.
Any given individual's singular vote (which is likely nullified by the marginal person in the opposite party) just has so little impact compared to Atwood's $8m political contribution that it's a rounding error.
The 2024 election had a turnout of about 59% of the voting age population. Since 1972, only one presidential election had higher turnout than that (it was 2020). If the 2024 vote didn’t represent everyone, then most every election for the last half century has been even worse at representing people. Figures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...