51–60 of 391 posts
> Remember that you don't vote to make a difference, you vote because it's your obligation to do so. Really? Its my obligation to help the rest of the people pretend we live in a democracy?
If more people voted, if fewer people like you held an attitude like that, then you wouldn't have to pretend.
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What if you disagree with the system of giving everyone a vote being a valid way to decide things?
Because, like it or not, that is the system and you can only change the system from within. "I disagree with the system" is intellectually lazy and in my experience merely a cover story for apathy.
So if you disagree with that premise (That one person per vote is fair), what should you do? throw your useless vote in the box with all the people who voted because they like the candidates hair?
FWIW I vote anyway since it's the lesser of 2 evils.
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If 100% of eligible people voted, it still wouldn't be a pure democracy. It's not how the system is designed. Our system is built on the assumption that most people don't have the time or capacity to understand all the issues, so we elect people to do the understanding for us.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. It seems like you're saying that to be a democracy it must be that everyone has a say/vote in every decision made about every issue. Is that right?
The solution isn't to get more people voting. It's to run better candidates.
In Australia voting is mandatory. If you're registered to vote and you don't you can get fined. If no one is registered to vote at your address you'll tend to get lots of mail about it (but ultimately, staying off the electoral roll isn't difficult). I used to think this was a bad idea as it forced people to vote who didn't really care. In recent years I've come around to the opposite point of view based pretty much…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bryan Caplan argues that in his field (economics), uninformed votes don't cancel each other out. The average opinions of the uninformed (non-economist laymen) differ consistently from the average opinions of the informed (professional economists): http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth... I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of other skills useful to high-quality voting, such as militar…
I'm curious as to how an economics field alters perception (I know votes are scarce, economists study individual choice, etc... But votes technically hold no value). I'd be more interested in a polisci / pollster / statistician perspective. I'm also a little leery of anything coming out of the Cato Institute. If this was a published study, that would be different. Given that the author is a professor, I'm willing to…
The link is to Cato Unbound, where they host an essay and discussion by outsiders to the Cato Institute. The participants aren't just libertarians; Matthew Yglesias had an essay not too long ago.
> I'd rather see the opinion peer-reviewed.
It isn't formal peer review, but there are reaction essays here: http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/november-2006/
> The author's main point seems to be that just because some people can vote, doesn't mean that they should vote. What he doesn't address is why the noise from the uninformed doesn't cancel out...(at least in my skimming).
Caplan addresses it in the last three paragraphs under How Misconceptions Are Possible, but he's pressed for space in that essay. He wrote about book about this. You can also find his argument here (PDF link): http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/Straight...
I don't know how laws and culture are in the USA, but in my country (Italy) vote is not an obligation. Vote is a right, and a hard earned one. It is also considered a civil duty. But never an obligation. The choice not to vote is also an expression of one's idea: that he does not believe in any of the politicians, or in the system as a whole. Lack of votes is also a measure on how much people believe in politicians.…
(If you don't believe in the system at all, do not make use of it at all -- and we don't see many people actually doing that.)
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Lack of imagination is another symptom of apathy. Doing nothing will not change the system, but it will perpetuate it.
How will voting change the system if no candidate is willing to change it? And just to be clear, I didn't say I'm not voting or that I think the system is broken. I'm asking you to explain your position.
Another view is that perhaps no one wants to change the system because it is, all things considered, better than the alternatives.
When I used to work on campaigns for a third party, the most annoying thing was the fact that there is a lot of inertia from people who have no idea who any of the candidates are ritually voting a party line. In NY, where I lived, there was even a special lever that marked the whole party row, to enable reduced thinking.
Another comment here says that politicians love an apathetic population. More correctly, they like apathetic populations that vote consistently.
In Australia voting is mandatory. If you're registered to vote and you don't you can get fined. If no one is registered to vote at your address you'll tend to get lots of mail about it (but ultimately, staying off the electoral roll isn't difficult). I used to think this was a bad idea as it forced people to vote who didn't really care. In recent years I've come around to the opposite point of view based pretty much…
And for those who complain about not having the right to abstain, you can get the same effect by turning up and spoiling your ballot paper. You can even make a show of doing it so that everyone can see you're deliberately not casting a valid vote. That makes more of a point that staying home and being invisible.
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Option B would be pretty interesting, and might provide a decent incentive for people to vote. However, if people aren't likely to vote anyway, why would they care how much representation they have in Congress? We effectively do have a "none of the above" option: don't select anyone and still cast the ballot. However, it would be better if there was an explicit "No vote" option. The biggest problem with voting not be…
«The biggest problem with voting not being mandatory is that a lot of people don't have the opportunity because they can't get off work. If you made voting mandatory (or at least made election day a paid holiday), this impediment might be alleviated.» An alternative, as it's done in Spain, is to give everyone the right to leave their jobs in order to vote. To alleviate things for businesses, all elections happen on S…