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Remind HN: Vote

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Re: Remind HN: Vote

#41

Post by andrew1 »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #13
cletus wrote: post #7

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.

It might be a similar effect but it's not the same effect. There's a definite difference between wanting to say that you are making the effort to take part in the electoral process but that you don't want to lend your support to any of the candidates; and for whatever reason not correctly filling out the ballot paper. If nothing else it makes for a much more interesting statistic, spoiled ballot papers tell you nothing about the intent of the voter, a 'none of the above' option would help with that.

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#42

Post by rrc »

In a perfect system, I would like to see voting require a license. People require a driver's license because uneducated drivers can harm others. Uneducated voters can cause similar harm to others.

Taken to the extreme, you could have a direct democracy where individuals vote directly for proposed bills, bypassing the (usually vested) middleman. Voters would have to pass some competency exam on the subject of the bill before being allowed to cast a vote. In other words, you can't vote on internet regulation if you don't know how to access a web page.

The reason there will never be a license to vote is because you transfer an immense about of power to those who create the exams. Influence the exams and you decide the election. In addition, by putting up barriers towards voting, you decrease overall participation in the election, possibly alienating the general population.

Perhaps a better, more realistic option is to move towards direct democracy while simultaneously improving as much as possible education.

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#43

Post by bali »

imeikas wrote: post #39
cletus wrote: post #7

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…

In Estonia you can vote from almost anywhere if you have ID-card and working internet connection. It's really convenient and people are using this more and more. For example last elections 15.75% of votes were made using internet. Official statistics can be found from http://vvk.ee/voting-methods-in-estonia/engindex Also there are talks that they want to enable voting with mobile phones (there are already solutions w…

This is even much better than to penalize. Why isn't there a startup helping the government? :) http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/23/the-goldmine-of-opportuniti...

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#44

Post by [deleted] »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #37
mkr-hn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#45

Post by epo »

mkr-hn wrote: post #32
epo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How will voting change the system if the system doesn't produce a candidate who can or will change it?

Lack of imagination is another symptom of apathy. Doing nothing will not change the system, but it will perpetuate it.

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#46

Post by mkr-hn »

epo wrote: post #45
mkr-hn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will voting change the system if the system doesn't produce a candidate who can or will change it?

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.

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#47

Post by frobozz »

mkr-hn wrote: post #31
frobozz wrote: post #3

If you vote for a losing candidate, then you can complain that your voice has not been heard. If you vote for a winning candidate, then you can complain when they break their promises. If you don't vote, you have nothing to complain about but your own laziness.

If you don't vote and have a good reason for it, you have every right to complain.

True - I didn't vote in one election because I was unavoidably away from home, and the postal voting form didn't arrive until after I'd left. It didn't stop me complaining.

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#48

Post by mbreese »

michaelkeenan wrote: post #25
mbreese wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This column was originally written in Oct 2000. I wonder if he still holds the same opinion. I think that the problem with assuming that the uninformed shouldn't vote is that you assume that all of the uninformed don't vote, or that the distribution is uniform. This is far from the case. It might be the case that we should encourage everyone to vote, so that all of the uninformed votes might cancel each other out.

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 give him a little slack, but I'd rather see the opinion peer-reviewed. I don't follow economics well enough to know of any contrarian points of view.

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. Or more accurately, why wouldn't more noise be better noise? He states that the errors compound, but he never really give a good reason why (at least in my skimming).

I still maintain that the current distribution of uninformed voters isn't uniform. There was a study a while ago (but I can't remember the citation) that said that an increate in even uninformed opinions strengthened predictive power. So in this case more idiots were better idiots. I wish I remember what field this was in though...

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#49

Post by kelnos »

Remember that you don't vote to make a difference, you vote because it's your obligation to do so.

That's crap. Why should I feel obligated to do something that has no affect on anything?

(I'm not saying that's definitively the case, but your statement implies that you should vote even if your vote doesn't matter. Why?)

Re: Remind HN: Vote

#50

Post by mbreese »

ugh wrote: post #34
mbreese wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why don’t you vote on Sundays like I don’t know how many other nations in the World? It doesn’t make any sense.

It's written in the Constitution as to when voting should occur. Remember, this was written for the late 18th century, so doing anything on Sundays was generally frowned upon. Plus, changing something like this would be far more difficult than just giving everyone the day off.

However, in this country there is a constant struggle between trying to let more people vote versus trying to restrict voting. Hence why a lot of people are up in arms about potential voter fraud. The traditional wisdom is that more voters helps one party, fewer helps another. With this as a factor, you can see how it would be very difficult to change the day of voting to make it more convenient for people.

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