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Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US
HughPickens.com writes CNN reports that when asked how to offset the influence of big money in politics, President Barack Obama suggested it's time to make voting a requirement. "Other countries have mandatory voting," said Obama "It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything," he said, adding it was the first time he had shared the idea publicly. "The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups. There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls." At least 26 countries have compulsory voting, according to the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Failure to vote is punishable by a fine in countries such as Australia and Belgium; if you fail to pay your fine in Belgium, you could go to prison. Less than 37% of eligible voters actually voted in the 2014 midterm elections, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts. That means about 144 million Americans — more than the population of Russia — skipped out. Critics of mandatory voting have questioned the practicality of passing and enforcing such a requirement; others say that freedom also means the freedom not to do something.
i would like the freedom to not be spied upon... if that takes mandatory voting... lets do it.
With voter turnout this epically low, we are at the point where all the eligible voters who don't vote could band together and elect a president and VP who aren't even on the ticket. Whether or not mandatory voting would help is unclear, but voter disenfranchisement doesn't help anyone and neither do all the various voter suppression methods that we see in each election cycle. Something should be done to push back.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Would it though? I feel like forcing everyone to vote, including those who aren't interested in what's going on and usually don't go out to vote, would lead itself to be more influenced by whoever throws the most money into advertisements.
One big problem with this plan for democrats: Voters would have to present ID to get credit for voting.
Nice try, though.
sig: sauer
What's next? The government is going to tell us what to eat? Or force us to buy services or products we don't want?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Would you vote a dookie for president for $10?
Don't mind me, I'm just enjoying this blank comments page before it becomes a shitfest. My sympathies if you're coming in later.
and that's the corporate overlord leadership party - it includes republicans, democrats, liberals, conservatives, independents and anyone else who accepts money :)
Over time I have gotten a little more interested in politics and voting. but when i was not interested, me voting was useless. I did not make a informed decision. So do you really want the uninformed/non interested making a vote. Then it really could become a popularity contest instead of more on the facts. Make sure you are seen more then the other guy and people like that persons face and you could win based on that.
Seriously, why aren't Election Days mandatory holidays? Do it over two days: The last Thursday before normal Election Day is Alternate Election Day, when people who will be working on Election Day must have off. Then everybody else takes Tuesday as a holiday. That, combined with absentee ballots should be an excellent start.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
So disgusted, not even gonna bother with why. I'm sure others who agree will do so. Thank you to those who can stomach typing it out.
Like not pay taxes?
I have read about mandatory voting in other countries... what can happen is that in elections that people really don't care about, they wind up voting for Mickey Mouse, the FSM, or some other character just for kicks.
However, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and maybe it might be a wise idea to at least get people to the polls somehow, even if they just play Tetris with the checkboxes on the voting machines, just to get rid of voter apathy.
Take the money OUT of politics.
Stop outright lying.
It too obvious that congress critters have a price tag.
Until that changes, there is no hope for America.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
What it does have is mandatory attendance . What you do in the voting booth is your own business. And all of which is done on a Saturday.
If anything I think the USA would be better off with moving the election day from Tuesday. See Why Tuesday? for info about the slow push to make this change.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
This guy would be just be pathetic... He goes from one insanely controversial idea to the next without really bothering to explain or justify any of it. I mean seriously, imagine if congress weren't deadlocked... this guy would be the biggest lame duck president... ever.
The whole situation is bizarre. It is like congress took its gun out of its desk, stuck it in its mouth, and blew raspberry jam all over the walls... and then the president decided to eat a fist full of brand new recreational drugs... we'll call it mindfuck. And while that's going on the judiciary is more interested in its weekly bingo and bridge games to really concern itself with the situation.
It is as if every single branch has succumbed to their inherent weaknesses at the same time.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So if you don't exercise your rights (things you are allowed to do, but historically not required to), they fine/imprison you. Does this extend to other Constitutional rights once the precedent has been set? Can they force people to practice religion or carry a gun?
Let's not lose sight of the political angle here too. A lot of people don't vote in the US because they don't care enough to do it. If you make it mandatory, 144 million extra votes is certainly enough to skew the results in favor of the laziest possible approach - i.e. first one on the list, the guy who sounded nice in commercials, total random selection, etc - basically anything BUT an informed, well-considered decision. That laziness can be manipulated into a statistically significant result, make no mistake.
The US isn't other countries. Stop trying to make it like "they do it", Obama.
No ... people tend not to vote when there are only retards running for office.
What next, is he going to make all of the illegals vote too, or is that another case of them having more rights than the American citizens?
Seems like forcing people too ignorant to know who the candidates even are to vote isn't the best way to get better government, although it is certainly likely to get more votes for the Democrat party.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Want better elections, why not just have elections such that only 1%ers and corporations can vote. That's all politicians care about anyway.
Most of the population does not vote, with the exception of presidential voting.
Non-voting for many is a form of protest, because merely participation of voting where R or D win, legitimizes both parties and all the spending's, laws and wars that are controversial to put it mildly.
Many of those who do not vote would not vote for R or D, and would probably vote for other third party, which would disrupt the existing status quo.
Only insecure president, like Obama, would raise the idea that voting should be mandatory.
Only a Communist would make such a suggestion.
I think it is time to impeach the bastard.
Am much much more tired of the congress and all the idiot Republicans. Obama did a good job, I am not interested in hearing from people who think he didn't. 99 problems the US has and none of them are Obama.
That must be some very tasty Cool Aid.
Don't make it mandatory!
Pay people to vote!
A good first step would be to force companies to treat election day as a paid holiday. Many people can't or won't take the day off to go vote, and having the day off would pretty much be a requirement for compulsory voting. The Republicans won't go for either, though.
Then you're part of the problem. Not because of your opinion of Obama, but because you refuse to engage with people who disagree with you. It makes you identical to those "idiot Republicans" you claim to be tired of.
I don't vote because my single vote doesn't matter a damn and even if it did there are no parties i'd wish to vote for anyway. I'd rather stay in the warm watching TV than waste my time validating a system (democracy) that in practice doesn't actually work. When 50% of the population is by very definition below average intelligence yet still has 50% of the voting power there is something wrong with the system.
People don't vote because it doesn't make a difference in the long term - taxes go up and rights go down; it doesn't matter whose sanctimonious ass is filling the big chair, it all ends the same way.
So, choosing to NOT vote is a freedom that Obama wants to deny people? Reduce liberty?
You had me until that asinine hashtag
Pass mandatory voting law, and you can be guaranteed that nobody who voted for the law in congress will ever be reelected again. This could be fresh start.
Margins these days on many elections are within a percent or two, so non-citizen voting is enough to have a real impact on how elections swing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Best way to insure lots of votes - buy em.
"Choosing not to decide is still making a choice." There are those who may wish to stay partially off the grid by not registering to vote. There are those who consider absence to be a show of protest. Let those who wish to vote do so, freely without needing anything except a state ID. Let those who do not wish to vote live in peace.
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
He is an IDIOT
But what do you expect from a man who was raised by communists.
Impeach the bastard.
... something other than FPP voting. I favor IRV, but I'd take anything that has half a chance of getting more choices that might actually be elected into the system.
That is all.
I think it's pretty clear this was a commentary on why low voter turn out was bad, rather than a policy suggestion of fining or jailing people who don't vote.
Obama said that mandatory voting would change the political landscape, but that it would be a temporary solution. He went on to say that he'd prefer a constitutional amendment that clearly defined the role of money in politics. Propaganda from the people with money who don't want to lose control...that's all this CNN article amounts to.
Yes, we should have mandatory voting. But for that to be reasonable, voting has to be easy for everybody. That means strict requirements for polling place access (meaning reasonable maximum wait times and transit times), make voting day a mandatory national holiday (i.e., no business could force a person to work on voting day), and absentee voting should be available everywhere.
Voter fraud is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent anyway.
That's a huge Democrat lie. It is rampant where I live, and I have a neighbor who is a local "election judge" who even jokes about it. Not just a problem here either. Chicago and Ohio are pretty famous for it, and I very much doubt if it stops there.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So many idiots get their knowledge of the candidates by scripted television ads. This is how you end up electing Monty Burns.
If instead there was a website where you could put in issues you find important (checkboxes) and get a record of voting on these issues by people in office, you could see if your incumbent did what you find important. It'd require some hard workers to simplify complex obfuscated legislation into an easy to understand format, so it is not an easy website to make, but it would be valuable.
Then people would be forced to check how their politician did against what they find important before they reelect people at the voting machines.
God spoke to me
"The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups" - How convenient. Sounds like it's smack dab in the middle of the Democrat demographic.
"Failure to vote is punishable by a fine in countries such as Australia and Belgium; if you fail to pay your fine in Belgium, you could go to prison" - So we're going to punish lower income groups and minorities by fining them or throwing them in jail? Yeah...great plan.
"There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls" - Really? That's a pretty loaded statement. Typical wedge politics.
"Less than 37% of eligible voters actually voted in the 2014 midterm elections" - Yeah, you know why? Because people are fed up with the whole political process, both Democrat and Republican alike.
The last time I checked America was still a democracy. Choosing not to vote, while not a great choice, is our choice to make.
Say, a $10 tax credit if you submit your poll receipt? Or maybe civic minded companies could provide incentives: Starbucks gives you $2 off your next purchase with a voting receipt?
...Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for Dinner.
As if we needed any more reminders that Fascism comes from liberal ideologues...
Remember if they think there's one thing they think it's a good idea to have government force everyone to do, they have a hundred more topics they are having the same thoughts about, just not talking publicly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seems like the perfect scenario for which the application of the 2nd Amendment was intended. The government has been overstepping far too much lately, something like this would be well beyond the last straw.
Sure thing, go ahead and do it, but I'll just write "Fuck Off" in each category.
The act of voting is the only way a citizen has to prove they consent to be governed.
With valid ID (thumbprint?) & name & signature
Add in spending limits & contribution limits (people only, not business "they don't vote")
Equal access to being on the ballot to all candidates.
I would also be in favor of all "bills" in congress have no riders.
They can vote more often also.
Term limits & no special treatment on benifits (in office or out)
Lobbyist rule reform needs to happen too.
Let's have a government for the people, by the people, with a balanced budget
One the one hand he thinks mandatory voting as in Belgium is a good idea, but he is also opposed to the type of photo IDs they require to vote.
I suppose there's a compromise: maybe people could issue the ID to themselves (kind of like running your own email server). Or (in Chicago) give people as many IDs as they need.
if you don't vote, you won't be allowed to pay taxes. Check and mate!
I know, don't feed the trolls, but Belgium is not a police state. Go read something published outside the USA.
The census is mandatory (at least in Canada), and that seems to work well enough. If you don't fill out your census, eventually somebody shows up at your door to remind you, and if you keep ignoring it, then you get in trouble. I don't see how mandatory voting is any harder. The same number of people need to be made to do something, and it happens every roughly the same number of years (four years for voting versus five years for census, at least in Canada).
Of course, there's also a possibility for mistakes to be made. Like how last census, I filled out the census online, only to have a guy show up at my door telling me that I hadn't filled out the census and demanding that I do so. Which meant that I had to fill it out all over again, from scratch. And on paper this time, because if you get to the point where they show up at your door, then they also make an appointment to come pick it up, so you have to do the paper version.
The assumption is that money buys votes. It doesn't. It buys advertising on a lot of levels along with all the people who are needed to promote a given candidate. By requiring everybody to vote, candidates would have to spend even more money to be sure that they reach the half of the voting population that doesn't vote.
What we really need is to get rid of the winner-take-all for state electoral votes. Imagine you live in a county that regularly has a majority vote for one party but because a little more than half of the rest of the counties in the state regularly voted for the other party. Your votes no longer count because the electoral votes got flipped. What if this happens over and over? How represented would you feel?
How about national voting holiday. Perhaps in March or April where the holidays are sparse.
Require double-time wages if a co. requires somebody to come in for work, or at least double-time if required to stay more than 4 hours to encourage half-days. (A make-up voting day may be needed for those required to work all day, per signed note from employer.)
Anyhow, it would never pass the Supreme Court.
Table-ized A.I.
Does Obama mean voting as in they vote for you, your pets, and dead relatives, until there is at least 100% turnout?
Low turnout is a symptom, not the problem. Both parties are bought and paid for and are not very responsive to the rabble, so it is no surprise that most folks aren't very excited about elections anymore.
Most districts have been gerrymandered such that your vote does not matter, by design. If your district is 65% or more one party or the other thanks to disingenuous officials who rig the voting maps to keep their party in power there really is little reason to vote or even to keep believing the delusion that you are part of a good faith democratic system (you are decidedly not in the USA).
Finally, with a 2 party system with no minor parties of consequence I totally understand how a large and growing minority of voters cannot bring themselves to be affiliated with either party. The parties fight over issues rather than govern and there is no way to vote for "other" that will result in anything better than not voting at all. So it becomes a rational choice to not vote rather than wasting your time to cast a ballot that either does not matter, or for a party you very much do not approve of.
Just implement nation wide same day voter registration, and a good portion of the population will turn out to vote. Idaho has it, and gets about 20% higher voter turn out than the rest of the country. For example 2012 turnout was 59%, but in Idaho it was 75%. The "oh I forgot to register" nonsense goes out the window when you just have to show up. When we have that then move it to the Weekend or declare election day some kind of national holiday were the government is kinda open, and banks are closed. Then the "oh I have to work" excuse leaves. Then doing "mandatory voting" becomes meaningless because all who are willing are all of a sudden able, and that'll be most of the population.
...oh wait.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
99 solutions to existing problems and he's solved none.
You have low standards.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Just to accidentally veer back on topic for a moment (it won't last, don't worry), mandatory voting, at least if it allows write-ins, might do something a bit unexpected, too. A lot of people don't vote because they think (know, actually) that voting for either of the mainstream political parties is voting for more of "the same", where "the same" is not a good thing by the vast majority of measures.
Force them to vote, they may go, "ok, fine, I'll vote, but you won't like it." And consider: With only 37% voting previously, those people could ALL be outvoted by the new influx. This could be a huge win for 3rd parties / candidates.
Such a result would amuse the hell out of me. And it could be really, really good for the country.
So bring it on, I say. Remains to be seen if the votes of those who simply aren't engaged (the ignorant by virtue of busy or poor education... the stupid are pretty much accounted for already) would tear us a new one. But hey, the new one isn't likely to be worse than the one we've got now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Your options are: +1 a candidate, 0 (stay home), or -1 a candidate by voting for their opposition. So they want to shrink it to just two options. That actually gives people less choice.
Since when is a statistical sample of 37% not adequate? Is there any other case where the entirety of a group is sampled at anywhere near that rate?
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
I am neutral to mandatory voting. I believe they have this in Belgium, but it is not strictly enforced with sanctians, so the polical system works similar to neighboring countries. America has bigger political issues: 1) too large influence on politics of big money: by rich people via superPacs and by corporations via lobbying or outricht corruption. 2) Effective two party system, where everything is decided on a single left-right axis, so that non-issues like gun rights and being patriotic or christian enough decide all national politics. Fix these two issues first., then we can discuss mandatory voting.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
form and control the opinion of these impressionable, indoctrinated, ignorant, dumb, young Americans who don't vote. Of course gov wants them to vote.
I'm Belgian. There is no mandatory voting here. There is only the obligation to show up on poll day and get a paper stamped. Many Belgians (including myself) don't vote (about 10% last election) and don't even show up. No one has ever gone to jail for that, no one has been fined for not showing up in decades. There have even been politicians that were on the polling lists that publicly admitted not voting because they did not believe in mandatory voting.
It is noticeable that it is always our right wing politicians that try to get rid of everything that tries to motivate people to go vote though. Probably for the same reason Obama wants mandatory voting: the majority of the population is not served by voting right wing parties in power.
So the problem is that voter turn-out is low, and the solution is to force people that apparently don't give enough of a crap to vote, to vote on things they clearly know nothing about? I think it's very telling that the Democrats constantly worry about "low turnout" and try to get apathetic moron's to vote. Is it because they know that on paper "free healthcare" and "more welfare" sound great to the uninformed masses?
This is the most dangerous time in my living memory to be an American citizen. The government has beaten us, as a people we are divided on something as simple as government. When you get both sides finger pointing at each other and saying "but he/she", we can't see the slight of hand. We are at a point where it's not the same country I was born and raised into, in some ways this is good as a people as a nation we should learn grow and evolve. It seems we are regressing in our freedoms and some if not most don't see it. This is how it works, it's just like feature creep by the time it's spotted it's far too late to change it. Those that make the same claim I have are labeled as wingnuts, it's only a conspiracy theory if untrue.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
And if asking someone to drive to the DMV and get a photo ID is too much of an imposition and tantamount to "Racist", what would this be?
Fine, go ahead, make it mandatory, have Automatic Registration, with biometric ID used at the polls. If you are going to go all Orwell, do it right.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"Am much much more tired of the congress and all the idiot Republicans. Obama did a good job".
Isn't it a main responsibility of POTUS to lead and manage the legislative branch?
"99 problems the US has and none of them are Obama"
The jury's still out on that. His actions won't be measurable for at lest 8 years and we won't see exact results for at least 4 more.
That said, at the minimum, his rubber stamping of extending the Patriot Act perfectly demonstrates how his actions differ from his campaign platform and his ability or need to stand up for the people that elected him.
My guess is history will just see him as a "flash in the pan", using suggestions and band-aids to satiate whoever, but lacking a backbone to stand and do what's right.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A state non-driving Photo ID is free in Indiana, where I live. I think they have a ID at the polls requirement that hasn't faced legal challenges, though.
I'm fine engaging with people I disagree with, but i don't blame OP for one second. I wasn't a fan of bush, personally or politically, but i could look at an issue, or a statement that he made and form an opinion on that one thing without hyperbolic rhetoric claiming him to be some dictator trying to shove, i don't know, something down my throat. Hell bush said everything would be much easier if this was a dictatorship, and i just thought it was a funny and true statement coming from someone in a position that gets all of the blame but has little he can do to affect what he gets to sign.
Can you imagine if Obama said that. Fox new would have breaking news headlines all day every day claiming that "Obama thinks America better off with Dictator".
Im not going to argue facts with people that want there opinions taken as fact, and i hear this shit every god damn day. If its not something about how Obama is a racist, or a socialist or a tyrant or the worst president ever, or....hell take this story, the even quoted what he said in the summary but the title is what...
Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US
Except that he didn't say that, he surmised that other countries have mandatory voting, then went on to say that IF everyone voted it would be transformative. He never mentioned anything about having mandatory voting here. A simple discourse on voter turnout and its affects on politics turns into, OMGZ!!!!OBAMA!!!!MANDATORY!!!!OMGZ!!!!!
I'm seriously considering moving out of the US, and it has nothing to do with Obama or Bush or any policy positions or anything the government has done at all. If I leave, it will be because of the people. It will be because of people who care about czars, and signing statements and executive actions when the "other team" is in office yet can always find justification when "their guy" is in office.
The problem isn't Republicans. It isn't even Democrats.
(The problem may not even be Libertarians but we will never know will we...)
Our problem is government by popularity contest in a world that will keep watching more then 5 seconds after they hear "Kardashians". We have a people that let the courts declare that corporations have the rights assigned to people. We have "We The People" who are so adverse to risk that they live in fear of terrorists while living in the safest era in human history and then they demand that the government devours personal liberties en masse to give what is only the popular appearance of something called "safety". We have a country that when polled 80% were in favor of warning labels on food that has DNA in it. (And if you are reading this and you don't know why DNA warnings are an unbelievably stupid idea then you are an idiot and you should stop reading now and take some remedial science courses immediately.)
How to solve this? (If it is even remotely possible...) Demand that children are COMPETENT in critical thinking and understand that the underlying principles of this country are about taking the RISK OF LIBERTY, that government DOES NOT SOLVE PROBLEMS, and to take personal responsibility for things around them.
(... Hallelujah... Holy shit... Where's the Tylenol?)
The amount of stupidly cast votes we get now is mind-boggling.
You want to add to that "spite" votes in response to mandatory voting?
ALL hashtags are asinine because Twitter is asinine.
A prime example for mandatory voting is Swizerland. But they have a 'direct democracy' (mostly) which means many laws are directly voted for by the population, not in the parliament.
America has a much bigger problem than lack of voters. First of all it is the more than archaic voting system from the late 1700s.
Secondly it is the abuse allowed in it: we have a district that voted mostly republicans and it is surrounded by mainly democrates? But last 4 year many 'democrates' moved into that district?
Lets just reshape the districts, so we are certain that we still have a republican majourity in said district.
In america before every election the 'ruling party' reshapes the voting destricts based on population data in the hope to 'manipulate' the outcome in their desire.
In every other nation that is considered 'voting fraud' or 'voting manipulation'. In the US it is business as usually.
Then comes the need to register for votes ... poor and underdogs, minorities etc. don't like to register.
Then you have the two party system (I really wonder why you laugh about China etc. with a one party system ...)
Then the 'electors' system ... it got changed at some point, but it is still retarded.
Then you had the Bush voting frauds ... come on, in every nation of the world, that is not a dictatorship, that election had been invalidated and Bush would be in jail and had haved no chance to even stay up for the 'Ersatzelection' ... but now 15 years later, who cares *shrugg*
Americans are really really strange regarding that ...
And from thst everything that is evil follows in the USA.
Who gets voted into office? Judges? Sheriffs? State Attorneys?
None of them is doing his job, they all only work to get reelected!!
Police cought one who has no aliby?
Sheriff: lets drop the hunt for the true culprit, lets focus on catching more idiots!
State atorney: How can we get him convicted? Hm, should be easy, he can not defend himself!
Judge: the harder I punish him, the more points I get for the next election!
How retarded is that? In germany the prime responsibility of a state atorney is to convict the right culprit, not a random 'victim'!
There are plenty of cases (in germany) where the state prosecutor in the end himself in the final speech plead 'non guilty' because it was obvious the guy charged was non guilty. Something like that can not even happen in the USA ... your law system is not much better than sharia, except cheating on your spouse is not punished (yet!)
Lets not even start with the idea that a jury in our days is the right thing to 'judge' a culprit.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Voter fraud is when an actual voter votes multiple times
In some areas they bus people to multiple polling stations. If no ID is required it's easy to vote for someone else at each station.
Chicago is famous for the dead voting. Just who do you think shows up at the polls to do so, and why do you think they would only vote for the dead person?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I vote for FUCK YOU. You want me to legitimize these K street criminals? FUCK YOU. To the assholes who arrest 20 million citizens for a racist drug war? FUCK YOU. For a govt that militarized it's police into a Gestapo cadre that can murder like Brazilian death squads with imputinty thanks to no independent oversight? FUCK YOU. To activist judges on the Supreme Court? FUCK YOU. There is no govt. it's all a scam and a sham. FUCK YOU.
Mandatory Voting? Because the world needs President Comancho. http://imgur.com/XSgEnxT
I've always thought the itinerary of national events in the US should be as follows:
Make all three days a mandatory Federal Holiday:
July 2nd: Federal Income Tax filing due (instead of April 15th)
July 3rd: Election Day (Instead of Tuesday in November)
July 4th: Independence Day
Many problems solved, IMHO.
Mod UP!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Follow in the footsteps of Oregon. Automatic voter registration and universal vote-by-mail. A ballot automatically shows up wherever you get your mail, provided you're known to the state in any capacity whatsoever as an 18+ year old human. You have more than a month to research issues/candidates, fill it out, and drop it back in a USPS or free ballot-only mailbox. A non-partisan voters guide even shows up in your mailbox a few weeks before the ballot arrives. No more begging for time off work to go wait in line for two hours to use an unverifiable machine. No more issues with transportation to polling places, or equity issues surrounding placement of polling places.
Don't bother making it mandatory until you make it easy.
But Obama, force me to vote and I'll vote against everything you believe in.
There is nothing more dangerous than an uneducated vote.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Why is this fool President? Make it mandatory and I for sure will not vote. Enough is enough. You MUST vote for tweedledee or for tweedledum, comrade! That way they can claim a mandate from the People for whatever oppression they next foist upon you.
How ironic.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
1) Import 30 million of illegal aliens, many of whom are illiterate not just in English but in Spanish 2) Provide them a sneaky legal path to citizenship and voting 3) Implement mandatory voting Result: Democrats win every election.
As a inhabitant of Belgium: I can assure you that the punishments aren't enforced.
10% of the eligible voters don't actually come to the voting poll
Another 5% of the voters does this blank or invalid. This means with compulsary voting in belgium we only reach around 85% of the eligible voters (looking at the latest elections).
Small semantic detail: you are not required to vote in belgium, you are only (technically) required to go to the voting station. You can legally put an empty ballot paper (electronic or old skool) in the box.
As said before, either way it doesn't make much difference, as the rule is rarely enfoced (I think if you don't vote for multiple elections in a row they might punish you, but missing one election won't give any result).
It does not follow that more voting will reduce the influence big money has on politics. Whoever is voted in still is subject to the influence.
Further, representatives will be voted in based on what they say. What they say will be heard more when they have more money to advertise, campaign, organize, etc.
There's plenty better solutions than forcing people to vote. Really poor critical thinking with his suggestion. Really it's a stupid idea.
People don't vote because there is very little practical difference between the candidates nowadays. The parties (and their financial backers) set up a horse race between the two top contenders most amenable to the parties (and their financial backers), not the voters.
Oh sure, the voters can chose a candidate in their primaries, and they later can chose between the candidates from the different parties, but the actual decisions about the future leadership of the country have already been made by the parties and their financial backers.If it makes you feel like a rebel or a patriot, you can occasionally vote for the 3rd party candidate (but not so much anymore). They might garner some of the vote, but generally have no chance of winning, and don't change the fact that the candidates of the two major parties have already been selected for you. They might sway the election from one party to another, but that doesn't really make a difference. The American voter gets the choice of 31 flavors, but they're unfortunately all vanilla.
Here are U.S. presidential popular vote results since 1980 (if you don't remember who won, Google it or something). Note that the difference between the major party candidates hasn't exceeded 8% since 1984 (average difference was about 5% and has been decreasing with time), and that the party balance has bounced from Democrat to Republican several times in those years, even with major 3rd party rabble-rousers like Ross Perot. 3rd parties have been effectively snuffed (remember Ralph Nader? Me neither).
1980 50.8% 41.0% 6.6% (Anderson)
1984 58.8% 40.6%
1988 53.4% 45.7%
1992 43.0% 37.5% 18.9% (Ross Perot)
1996 49.2% 40.7% 8.4% (Ross Perot)
2000 47.9% 48.4%
2004 50.7% 48.3%
2008 52.9% 45.7%
2012 51.1% 47.2%
A variable +/-5% difference between winning and losing does not connote blow-out landside win to me. Sounds a lot like coin toss odds, exactly what you would expect if there was no real difference between the candidates.
The upshot - the variation in candidate choices has flat-lined. The candidates are effectively clones - they'll do their backer's bidding, no matter who actually wins the election. Vote if you like, but don't expect big change.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Forcing people to vote in a FREE country? Um, not showing up to the polls is effectively saying "NONE OF THE ABOVE" and/or "I DON'T CARE" which is an opinion which we should be free to express. You can't force people to vote. That's nuts.
What we need are TERM LIMITS.
I suggest 12 years in elected Federal office (House, Senate, or combination of both) be the maximum any one person can serve in Congress. Of course a person could still run for president or serve in appointed positions beyond that.
Yes, this would take a constitutional amendment.... But it fixes the incumbent money advantage by forcing turnover, which also disrupts the possible corruption and influence peddling.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Remove polls and make it so that the only way to vote is when you file your taxes. That way I can vote whenever I damn well please, as long as it is before the Tax cuff off date.
Captcha:Vetoed
You get joke candidates. You get people voting for "Daffy Duck."
So you can force people to go to the polls, but you can't force them to care.
I think a better approach would be to make the voting day a federal mandatory holiday. Shops closed too.
Sure, some people will just play video games all day, but at least they can't use excuses like "I had to work" to shirk their civic duty.
And it is a duty. People died so you could vote. People are dying today for the right to vote. And to just ignore the luxury of voting, to live in a country where you get to pick the leaders? For laziness and cynicism? "The people in charge don't represent me so why should I vote" ...they don't represent you BECAUSE you don't vote, moron. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
In fact: make it Veterans Day. November 11.
What better way to honor those who died for this country than to show you care by voting? And if you say "in some wars they died so I could vote but in other wars it was just imperialist bullshit"... well then vote, moron, so we don't have legislators and presidents who want to start imperialist wars. Do you understand the purpose of voting now?
You can't combat all low IQ alienation, but you don't have to respect it.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, and a minority movement in Australia is trying to end that because other countries DON'T have mandatory voting. Talk about the dog chasing its own tail.
Oh, and both major parties of the Australian government have passed 61 laws in the name of national security. The latest effort to specifically stop terrorists and pedophiles allows mass surveillance and meta-data storage. While mandatory voting keeps the political winning margins very small, both parties can still tag-team on the 'you (the voters) are the problem' game.
The very reason we have the democratic and republican parties is that the voting public is already comprised largely of the stupid. Given the realities of the Gaussian, most of what's that's left should be smarter people.
Uh-uh. Many of the poor don't file taxes, and it's perfectly legit. Your idea would lock them out of any active political role in determining their own destinies. You can't lock people out of voting. Period.
I'd substitute "unconstitutional" for "bad for the country", and remove "solely to screw the other party", and make them stay here so their fellow citizens could sneer at them on a regular basis, but yeah. If you enter public service, and you don't serve the public, I figure that's maximum bad behavior with absolutely huge harm. Worse than anything else on the books. Seriously. Murderer kills what, a few people? Bad law hurts people by the tens or hundreds of thousands or even (drug laws, for example) millions, tens of millions.
I'm honestly quite surprised that one of the more severely injured victims of bad law -- and there's plenty of it, and of them -- hasn't already taken their mistreatment directly to the source(s) as a matter of some well-deserved kickback. Still, only a matter of time, I'm thinking. All it takes is one person with not much more to lose and a good reason. Good reason being trivially available in prolific amounts, the rest is just a matter of social Russian roulette for congress and SCOTUS.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm a concerned citizen with a graduate degree and I often feel befuddled when trying to figure out how to vote.
If you make voting mandatory, you better include a mandatory informing process as well that is well designed and accessible so that people can actually have a clue as to the consequences of their decisions. Good luck.
So his plan is to force uninformed, gullible morons to vote? What could possibly go wrong?!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
As far as I can tell, one problem is that in the USA you can't get time off to vote, so if you're a peon, you won't be able to vote unless you take vacation time off. If it's going to be mandatory, then businesses would have to let you go vote.
Mandetory voting is one of those dumb ideas that gets tossed around time to time. It gets promoted by what ever people thing that by forcing people to vote those forced voters would vote in that party's favor. This is a very dangerous way to 'get out the vote' as it were.
We're supposed to live in the 'land of the free' and one of those freedoms is the right to not vote. Please do not vote if you don't want to vote. I vote. When you don't vote I get more power!
Some of the most impactful people/organizations aren't voted in by "the people", like Supreme Court Judges, military contractors, 3-letter agency's directors. The president can only do so much but all the focus is in choosing one.
I'd be OK with it if there was a "None of the above" choice that was binding.
Note how this legislation continues to be directed at you and me. The solution to corrupt policians involves threatening *us* with fines and prison for not doing our proper bits. It's not as if our elected leaders can help it, they're practically victims! Just going on with the system they've been given by a degenerate populace. No point in cracking down on the way they behave. But eventually in spite of us they will obtain their utopian society, I suppose -- just have to keep restricting us until we get into our thick heads to behave the perfect way they have envisioned for us, and then everything will be swell.
To properly understand what Obama means by the undue influence of money, you have to unpack the political dialect a bit. Obama was ushered into his latest term on a >$1 billion campaign, and has turned his back on statements about lobbyists and public financing, so it's not that he abjures the influence of money in politics. But it is bad when money is wielded to effect by the other party. (The other party is in fact the only one capable of corruption, one's own party might have some rogue individuals who make regrettable decisions, but their political principles are, if anything, redemptive.) This statement comes on the tail of the 2014 election, in which Obama's party was routed, due largely to poor turnout. In general democrats fair better from greater voter turnout. So this would be a nice fix to that, and probably would decrease the influence of money in politics, at least in the sense that it would not longer be needed to mobilizing voters and could instead be spent in focus on telling them which way to vote.
Of course, any electoral change is going to benefit one party or the other, and they will decide their allegiance to it accordingly. But I think it's sound to say any idea that comes out of party leadership is not going to be about "reform" it is going to be about consolidating their own power. Changing election mechanics is not going to be the means of rebuffing them and kicking them out of power. It is going to be the thing to do once we've built up the spine to kick them out ourselves.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
It's the lack of viable options.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It would be transformative to have representatives that aren't crooks or straight-up liars. Find a person that has no special interests or PAC affiliations and you'll see some voter turnout. Maybe.
Let's say that domestic spying is your #1 concern - who do you vote for?
If I were unilaterally pick who becomes the next president I'd pick Ron Paul, because I believe he would put a quick end to domestic spying (and because I'm a pretty hardcore libertarian.) However, the rational thing to do is to select from whichever of the (D,R) candidates I believe is infinitesimally least bad, because it is certain that one of them will win.
If we used Range Voting instead of plurality voting then the rational decision would be to cast an honest vote. In my case in the last election it would be something like Hillary=0%, Obama=10%, Romney=15%, GaryJohnson=85%, RonPaul=100%. Range voting not only allows you to express all of your desires, but does away with the need for political parties/primaries.
But in our current system - vote for who?
'cause something like no matter whom you vote for, you'd be sorry. Like choosing your own poison.
I won't trust computers with my votes. Too much opportunity for manipulation and rigged elections.
The "turnout requirement" where an election had to be done over if voters failed to show up originated in the USSR. There was only one candidate on the ballot, but if you failed to turn out and vote for him you could get yourself and your neighbors in hot water.
Mandatory voting is not a sign of democracy and freedom. Quite the opposite.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Spoken like a true AC.
Do a little searching of the news. You should find references that there are at least 850 registered voters over 150 in New York City. In North Carolina there are over 2200 registered voters over 110 and at least two actively voting over age 150, the oldest being 160 when a vote was cast in 2012. These people would be automatically purged from the voting rolls if votes were not being regularly cast against their registrations. And, by an amazing coincidence, the vast majority of these voters are registered Democrats.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Lack of interest in voting is primarily caused by poor choice of candidates. Trying to chose the lesser of two evils is such a hassle. Source: my opinion. In Australia we have compulsary voting, it just wastes my time ... I have to walk to the voting place, wait in lines, look at various party billboards full of empty promises, just to get my name ticked off a list to avoid a fine...all just to drop an empty ballot....
The problem is even if you are lucky enough to find a politician with wonderful sounding promises, there is the track record of election campaign promises to remember....
I think it would fine assuming exemptions can be made for shut-ins, hospitalized people, etc.
However, I think before requiring U.S. Citizens to vote, every member of congress should be required to vote yea or nay (not "present") on every bill.
Before requiring us to do it, we who have jobs and lives outside of law making and politics, how about we require the ones who are paid to represent us by voting on bills, to vote on bills.
Here in Australia they keep complaining about wasted votes, without giving the population a way to explain why they don't want to vote. People should either fill out a ballot, or a short form to indicate why they don't want their vote to count.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Instead lets call the result of an election that does not have a majority of participants NULL. In the case of a congressional election, no one fills the seat. This will drive candidates back to the center. Our current system that has party members pandering to the extremes in their parties which results in a dysfunctional, polarized Congress.
Actually, money doesn't matter much once a candidate hits the "saturation point" in advertising. We've seen that quite a few times where one side or the other will outspend their opponent by 7 to 1, and yet still lose. Money only matters if one candidate can hit saturation and the other can't.
surely we should follow the Christian right-wing and make voting Illegal unless you have paid enough?
Constitution
Mandatory proportional representation in the electoral college would also be nice. It would help people feel more like their vote makes a difference.
Hahaha, American Politics.
A place where your vote is literally a waste of your life because you can't evict the people that actually matter in government.
Good luck enforcing this without a civil war.
If voting is mandatory, then simply providing 'abstain' as an option satisfies those who don't want to support any candidate: but it is mandatory that they make an effort to say so. (That is, until someone changes their name to Ian Abstain and runs as I Abstain).
I have no intention of ever casting a vote for a Democrat or Republican, but I will vote on local and state measures. There is a middle ground between refusing to participate in a broken system and exercising what little agency you have over your government.
Learned as a child that the Soviet Union had mandatory voting to try to pretend like they weren't a totalitarian state. Very bad for any community that failed to have a high turnout, so they were always over 90%. Wondered why Obama doesn't remember this basic civics lesson. Then I remembered: he spent much of his childhood abroad where he wouldn't have been exposed to U.S. culture.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It's clear to most of us when our vote matters (turnout rises) and when it doesn't (low turnout).
In my district- I've had ONE vote in 17 years that mattered. The rest came down just the way the gerrymandering predicted.
I either voted with a 60/40 or higher majority or with a 40/60 or lower minority.
In the one vote, the race was by 31 votes. It was contested and maybe if it had been 30, it might have been contested longer. And turnout was high because it was clear the challenger might unseat the incumbent (and did.. barely).
Perhaps if we had term limits ...
But really modern computers can predict the outcomes from districts fro years at a time.
Silver and Wang predicted almost all of the elections for the last two cycles before the vote.
If it is clear which way the vote is before we go to the polls (and it almost always is) then why go vote?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Generally it has been held that the Constitution empowers states to decide who gets to vote and generally how elections are to be conducted (within limits, such as the 15th Amendment).
Well, no, it's not. The primary function of the POTUS is to be the chief executive of the administration. That is, all the agencies, administrations and departments of the federal government. So, along with that comes the responsibility to make appointments to the various non-legislative parts of the government... the dept of justice, for example. So it also goes with firing the other executives in federal government.
The influence of the POTUS on congress is really very small. He can offer vision or direction to the congress from the standpoint of what laws he says he will sign or veto, and the POTUS is going to lay out his direction every year in the state of the union address, but he has no vote in the making of legislation, no leadership role on any committee, and no legislative responsibilities other than the enacting or vetoing legislation at the end. There is a little niggle in that the president can convene or adjourn congress on the occasion of sweeping national tragedy, attack or martial law, but those are true rarities. The VP is the president of the senate, and that means he can cast tie-breaking votes in the event they are needed, but even this is a very limited role in the congress. One would suppose that the VP, if casting such a senate vote, would reflect the position of the administration and by extension the chief executive, but that's not written anywhere. In the early days of the country, the vice president was the guy who came in second in the presidential race, and had opposing views.
There's also the POTUS role of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, which he has for practical decision-making. We have the joint chiefs, but ultimately it's the president that is the one with the responsibility for what they do.
The POTUS is the single highest representative of the nation in foreign policy, and as he holds the top position over the secretary of state, he's responsible, ultimately, for making treaties with foreign nations.
That said, at the minimum, his rubber stamping of extending the Patriot Act perfectly demonstrates how his actions differ from his campaign platform and his ability or need to stand up for the people that elected him.
Well, anyone can hazard a guess, but I think history will probably treat him better than you think it will, though I do agree that he hasn't lived up to expectations. I'll also add that expectations were set uncommonly high. Between the time he got elected and when he took the oath, he was given a pretty cold and deep soak in the dirty bathwater from the previous administration -- and by that I mean extensive debriefing by the leaders of all the various departments of the government in the outgoing administration. Anyone with half a brain would change their opinions when presented with the real-life playbook left my the former tenant of the white house. I have no doubt that the national security stuff in particular was especially hard for him to change course on, as it wasn't part of his set of strengths. We were also at war in 2 places at once and he didn't want to be in any more of those, so he was pretty hawkish about looking out for threats.
Anyhow, I'll close with the observation that many people missed about him from the start. He was, and is, very much a person who wants consensus. He was far far too willing to kowtow to the demands of people that wanted him to leave the status quo in place -- and here I'm talking about the neocon chickenhawks and the big wall street banks. He did not, as most presidents do, clean house at the justice department and remove all the bush-era appointees, for example, even though they all got their JDs from Oral Roberts U and Liberty U and were diametrically opposed to everything he wanted to see. He let them stay, as a conciliatory gesture, hoping that it would earn him a place at the table with his nominal opposition. What he took awhile to learn is that he could not make nice with thes
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
It's abou' taaaaaamme Jimmeh
Slashdot should have First past the first post voting.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
"that would counteract money more than anything,"
Translation: "Please, please don't pass the Wolf-PAC (http://www.wolf-pac.com/) Amendment & get money out of politics. We can TOTALLY fix this ourselves. Go back to sleep, America."
Mandatory voting would end up with joke candidates winning in some states and the whole rigged system turning into more of a circus.
And the results are in for Georgia.... Jeff Foxworthy wins by ten votes!
at least the Democrats give the issues that matters to me (Worker's rights and declining middle class) lip service. The Republicans are pretty open about their contempt for anyone who's on the losing end of the modern economy (e.g. 90%+ of the populace).
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Fantastic idea, Obama. Remove Civics courses from schools and try to take away science classes and then make low-information, ignorant citizens vote. Great strategy. How could that possibly go wrong?
Mandatory voting is a hugely bad idea:
1) It goes against freedom
2) It encourages people to vote who have no idea (or less idea) what the issues are. This brings poorer choices and dilutes the votes of those who DO know what the issues are.
3) It encourages people to vote who apparently have no interest in the issues.
What we desperately need is the introduction of some form of preferential voting like instant runoff voting (and possibly the end of the electoral college). THAT would make a HUGE and PRODUCTIVE change in ways that really matter. We could then be free of being locked into a two-party race where both parties essentially suck. People could vote for who they want without fear they are throwing their vote away or fear of allowing someone they don't like getting elected because they didn't vote for the lesser of two evils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.fairvote.org/reform...
that with compulsory voting, the government can figure out for who each one voted and adjust the quality of health care that individual receives.
Human nature is such that this is unavoidable.
This message is brought to you by Karl Martell. EDUCATE YOURSELF.
People who have enough of an opinion to vote aren't going to be swayed by ads nearly as much as those, who had no interest in voting in the first place. These are the types of people who will more likely vote for the most familiar brand name.
If anything, we should be going in the other direction. If you can't name the vice president, or you don't know which party controls the senate, you should lose your right to vote, until you do. We need better informed voters, not less informed.
You first have to give a shit about the world around you.
Good luck legislating away apathy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... because it favours one right over another.
How about making gun ownership mandatory? How about everyone HAS to speak?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
That's what we need: more people in jail.
I have a counter idea: give us some reasonable choices. How about a few people in the government, who aren't on the take?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
The Electoral College was done away with. There have been a few cases where a presidential candidate lost the popular vote, but won the electoral vote.
This is basically the system saying, yes, the people want candidate A, but we know best, we're going to make candidate B president instead.
la plupart des observateurs assurent que depuis 2003, aucun électeur n’a été condamné pour avoir snobé un scrutin électoral.
Most observers confirm that - since 2003 - no voter was condemn for not having casted a vote during an election
He should have called this mandatory balloting, in which you are required to show up and cast a ballot, even if you choose to mark it "no vote".
This is a countermeasure for civic apathy, not civic dissent.
We'll call it 'slavery'.
“If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.”
Mark Twain
"That dirty dictator O, he's forcing democracy!"
Table-ized A.I.
...and it works. When everyone is enfranchised, the politicians have to have a much broader appeal. And every voter has to look long and hard at exactly who and what they're voting for.
I can recommend it. I take great interest in Politics in the US, since it effects us and the rest of the word. And it looks to me like the congress has been captured by a small number of extremely rich people and is no longer representative of the will of the people. This can only happen when only a limited number of people vote, and they can be heavily influenced by massive donations towards media advertising, and when certain highly motivated blocks of voters are far more likely to vote than other groups.
I'm also scandalized by way parts of the US make registering to vote so hard, and actively excluding people from voting. In Australia, if you're not in jail, you have to vote, period. No exceptions. Imagine if that was the case in the US, that it was a right that everyone had by default, regardless of having the right ID at the right time, or previous felonies etc.
The other thing we have which I can highly recommend is the Australian Electoral Commission. They're the group that runs all elections across the entire country. All of them. In a completely standardized way. So the ballot papers (yes still paper) and voting in every part of the country is exactly the same. They're not perfect - they lost a small number of ballot papers at the last election, and a part of the election had to be re-run - but still better than, say, the debacle in Tallahassee in 2000.
And our final innovation? Elections are always held on a Saturday, not a week day, which makes it dramatically easier for everyone to attend.
It's a duty of being a citizen where a government is elected by the citizens. Turning up and scrawling on a bit of paper "you're all evil bastards", or leaving it blank, is good enough if you don't think anyone is worth voting for. It still sends a message and may make someone try harder.
IMHO getting more people off their arses to at least turn up will provide room for minor parties that may actually engage with the population more than with political donors - so you guys may start to get back the USA you want instead of the one you complain about as if you are not part of the process.
Yes I know there are electoral colleges, voting on a Tuesday, hanging fucking chads, possibly rigged machines and all kinds of other barriers, but they can be dealt with.
In Australia when people don't turn up to vote and can't justify it there is a small fine, but it's rarely applied. There's a religious group (they call themselves that anyway) called "the exclusive bretheren" who refuse to let their members vote and none of them have been fined.
You can have mandatory voting without the threat of prison time and there's plenty of places where that is practiced.
As for your second point, ironically getting more people off their arses and into polling booths is a good way to remove people in government who are on the take. People who don't give a shit about political ideology are still likely to get pissed off by corrupt bastards and if they can actually do something about it by ticking a box in secret they can do so.
Look beyond your nose at places where it's already done. If "libertarians" had a clue they'd actually be cheering for this because it creates room for minor parties and independents instead of just flipping the Rep/Dem coin.
Maybe it's time...Fuck you Obama.
This is the most dangerous time in my living memory to be an American citizen.
So, born after the Cold War ended, then.
I tried to give a shit about apathy, but just couldn't be bothered.
Yeah, that's the least effective argument for Barack Obama. If he can force you to buy health insurance, forcing you to vote is a piece of cake. That's what Statists calling themselves "Liberals" do: whatever they believe to be a good idea, they try to make mandatory, and what they disapprove of, must be banned...
(Gebyy/synzronvg zl nff.)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Make politics not about who has the most money for their campaign.
In this day and age of social networking, why is it that voters still only consider Kodos or Kang, and then grizzle when they end up on a serving platter?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Let's make all bums vote. And give them a sandwich and a can of beer in the process. And then guess whom they are going to vote for!
Brilliant plan, Mr O!
Maybe if they are considering making voting mandatory they should actually give all American citizens 18+ the right to vote.
But then they can't silence people by imprisoning them amongst other things.
You don't need to make it mandatory, you need to make it a holiday. You want people to vote, but you don't want them to vote badly enough to give them a day off work. I get holidays for religious ceremonies... but not you know: the most important day in any democracy.
This.
Also known as a "No Confidence" vote, it tells ALL parties that they've ALL gone to the dogs, and have mishandled everything thrown at them, and have not provided any valid solutions for problems at hand (or the future, in the case of climate change).
If ALL ballots had the "None/No Confidence/No Opinion" option, I'd be the first mofo casting my vote(s). It would show, with little debate after the election, how many people WOULD get off their asses and vote, had the parties presented a viable candidate (or proposition).
I'm an independent, and the last time I voted (many decades ago), I found that I'd cast votes that went about 60% Republican, 30% Democrat, and 10% Other. I voted for candidates, NOT parties. Unfortunately, you can't do that nowadays, as the candidates are locked into the party system even tighter than before.
So, I vote "No Confidence". Fsck 'em all. We've got Hackerspaces now, how 'bout "Politispaces", where WE THE PEOPLE can get sh!t done without any party's "help"?
Mandatory voting seems nice, but another game-changer would be recall procedure at federal level.
There wasn't a single viable candidate. I didn't vote because there was no point. Forcing people to vote is akin to forcing people to toss a coin. You'll get a result and but it won't mean anything. I've always felt that if you can't take the time to educate yourself about politics, you should abstain from voting because you'll be hurting more than helping.
Maybe we'll see a really good president in my lifetime but not if everyone votes.
Isn't it a main responsibility of POTUS to lead and manage the legislative branch?
No, not his job at all.
Well of course. Mandatory voting (or else!) is the essence of a free society. Right?
I hope the government continues to promote and pull crap like this. The more they do, the faster the scales will fall from more peoples' eyes.
if you don't vote! Yeah, that's the ticket: Automatic revocation of citizenship! Deport me. I'd love it if the USSR would just let me go without further penalty!
That's all.
+1
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Osama is dead and GM is alive!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Who's the dipshit mod that deletes the good comments which follow the rules? Nice "community" jackass.
In Brazil we have mandatory voting, but it is far from perfect because the (big) campaings are paid by big companies. So, the more politicians are inclined to money, and to do "favors" when they win elections, the more companies will inject money. Even Lula (from the left party, in the good old days) surrendered himself (in part) for power and favors to become president. There is this idea going on here to make elections funded by public money, so every party would have equal chances. Of course, the big ones are not happy with this, since they will not be alowed to receive money from "donators". Alstom, for instance, is involved in corruption with a governor who made them win a contract to build some subway lines in São Paulo (the city, no the state). I think that, if in US voting becomes mandatory, it is likely the system will be the same we have here now.
I voted for Obama, not once but twice. The second time I voted AGAINST
Romney more than For Obama. The horror of a Mormon in the White
House was unthinkable, so I had to vote for Obama again though I knew
by then he was a liar.
I have never felt so betrayed by ANY politician in my life. Fuck Obama and all
his pretense and bullshit, I see him for what he really is, which is a schemer, a liar,
and an opportunist.
This is how much I am pissed off at Obama : next time, I vote REPUBLICAN, even if
they have a chimpanzee on the ballot. I detest Republicans, but my vote will be my way
of saying "Fuck you, Barack".
.
Should sexist opensource developers have their projects censored or removed?
Recently an opensource game release story was removed due to the game developer's open sexism(0) and harrasment(1) of women in tech.
A story posted by the editor of the popular Phoronix linux news site about a release of an Open Source videogame was later manually removed(2). The reason cited was the game developer's unacceptable views on social issues such as gender equality (3).
The release story was titled "Xonotic-Forked ChaosEsqueAnthology Sees New Release - Phoronix" and can be accessed via the google cache(4).
With the recent inclusion of a code of conduct(5) for those wishing to contribute to the Linux Kernel some questions now need to be asked and answered about the inclusion of code from people who are known to engage in or promote socially unacceptable attitudes or harrasments of those whom the free-software movement would prefer to attract in their place:
* Are the social or political views of an author of free software relevant to that software's inherent quality?
* Should the beliefs of an opensource developer weigh when when evaluating whether a piece of opensource software is worthy of any publicity or public notice?
* Should men with unpopular or "forbidden" views be excised from the opensource movement and "not allowed" to contribute, in a manner similar to that which is done in employment?
* Has the free/opensource software movement changed in these respects since its founding? If so is this a positive change?
* Should there be gatekeepers to opensource that decide who may and who may not contribute. Should abusive developers be "blackballed" to maintain proper social order and controls?
and
* What are the consequences of not doing this
Citations:
(0) Past related incident: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310
(1) http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/...
(2) Removed story URL: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
(3) http://www.phoronix.com/forums...
"Fortunately, the article has been removed now."
"Thanks everybody for speaking up."
(4) https://webcache.googleusercon...
(5) Linux "Code of Conflict"
Forcing people to vote sounds like something North Korea would do.
Obama is a tyrant.
How about introducing "against all" option on the ballot? I bet that would boost turnout. Democrats and Republicans are two flavors of the same: parties wholly controlled by corporations.
Jeb might be thanking you for your vote.
Only in favor if there's a Cowboy Neil style option.
I wish I was joking
A blog I run for the wealth
This is really dumb, come on people. If you make voting mandatory, then it ceases to have any meaning. The people who normally would not bother voting will show up just to avoid the new Obama poll tax. They will randomly check some boxes without caring what they are voting for, and go home.
Too many slacker-ass Whities in the USA and dumb-ass Blackies just making the situation worse.
After the Law Be Law:
First Offense: Cut-off da Right Hand of the Perp.
Second Offense: Cut-off da Left Hand of the Perp.
Third Offense: a) Cut-off the Penis or b) stitch up the Cunt.
Ha ha
Take My Pitch-a stitch my Bitch-a
I'll go to prison than be part of this crap.
If my choices are between Chucko and Bozo the clowns, I'll not be interested in voting. This upcoming presidential election may be between Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina. If that is the case, I will not vote because it's like a choice between cancer and ebola. The same existed in the California Senate vote. The choices were Barbara Boxer (bounced checks on the Senate bank account) and Fiorina who is a legend in her own mind. These are NOT choices. They are two awful candidates. The game is rigged.
They know everything about you so surely they could save you the trouble? Isn't that what you pay taxes for? Oh wait..
Jeb might be thanking you for your vote.
Jeb should thank Barack. It is Obama who has turned many of the faithful into rabid opponents.
I detest the Bushes and all the swine who schemed to get the US into several wars that did NOT
need to happen.
But I detest what Obama has done even more. And that's why I will vote for a person I despise. It is my way of
saying : "Fuck you for betraying my trust". To look at it another way, at least I know Bush will fuck most of the country,
but at Bush won't pretend to be my buddy before he fucks me, and I have a grudging respect for that.
So sayth the man who missed over 400 roll calls as "Senator Barack Obama."
If you want freedom, there is a price. It may mean going to war, even dying. But far, far, worse, it may mean you have to get off your arse once every four years and put a piece of paper in a box (or push a button).
No rights without responsibilities. (Dam# that! I demand all the rights and refuse any responsibilities)
Mandatory voting increases the difficulty of gerrymandering. That cosy majority when only 1/3 of people vote doesn't look so cosy when the other 2/3 show up.
Those 2/3 are more likely to vote for a third party.
And if everybody has to show up to vote, attempts to influence the vote by simply keeping people of the wrong sort away are far less effective.
No wasting so much advertising money on trying to get people to vote - it can be devoted to telling people why they should vote a particular way.
People can still exercise their democratic right to not give a rats a@#$ by voting for a minor candidate or just drawing a rude picture on their ballot paper.
This won't fix US politics, but it is a start. Once you guys have mastered this basic responsibility of the citizenry of an allegedly democratic country, maybe you can move on to some other simple concepts like:
* independent electoral commission responsible for electorate boundaries, vote tallying, anti-fraud, non-partisan electoral communications (e.g. where to vote, how to do postal vote, or absentee vote, etc.)
* logical system for electing the president (pretty much ANY system would seem to make more sense than your current method)
* some form of voting (e.g. quota system for multi-member electorates) that means less-popular parties end up with a number of seats roughly in line with their total % of votes
If you manage to deal with those, then you're ready for the biggie, the one which will actually make the most difference: real campaign finance reform.
Good luck. Bet you can't even get past step one, though.
What makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix thatWhat makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix that?
In fact it would cause more problems that it purports to solve. In particular, it would greatly increase the incidence of violence in politics and, in particular, the likelyhood of civil war.
Elections aren't about being nice by doing what the majority prefer. Elections are about seeing how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it. To do this they have to be a good enough MODEL of the war, and be run, if not squeay clean, at least honestly and transparently enough to convince the losers that, if they tried to reverse the result by violence, they'd lose THAT contest, too.
That means, among other things, that only people who care enough to fight should vote. Dragging in a bunch of people who could care less and are only voting because they're required to, dilutes the votes of those who care. If they also vote opposite to a group who care a lot and are percieved as a bunch of brainwashed non-threats, those people can easily convince themselves that they could win a war, make it stick, and are justified in fighting to reverse their oppression.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1. Voting becomes compulsory.
2. Party in power manipulates poll hours and ID requirements so that working poor and other groups can't vote without taking time off work, standing in long lines, triple-checking their papers, etc.
3. Working poor, etc., not only still have no voice but owe money for being excluded from voting.
(4. PROFIT!)
We need to make voting as easy and transparent as possible, not to impose rules the disenfranchised can't follow.
and look how great it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n6hvPP06Rs
The US constitution does not have this right, but in Canada we have the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of conscience, along with freedom of belief.
As an Anarchist is is morally wrong for me to vote. Even if you disagree with someone being an anarchist, I do not believe you would find it any sort of a leap to see how any anarchist could, in good conscience, vote.
Unfortunately, a belief in anarchism is not a protected right in the US, because it's not a religion. Thus, while in Canada such a law would be immediately struck down, it looks like our neighbours to the south will lose their right to disbelieve in all forms of government.
Democrats have pushed-through so-called "motor voter" laws in states like CA which (depending on the state) register people to vote when they get a driver's license or give them registration materials and urge them to register (with the implication that they MUST since it's being done with their driver's license) AND many of those states have also begun issuing licenses to illegal aliens. No Republican has won state-wide national office in CA since these policies went into effect (and CA performs no fraud checking; the Democrats who dominate state politics won't allow any, claiming that by not checking for any, they have found none, and therefore there is none.
The idea that voter ID is voter suppression is absolutely INSANE and racist (unless you count all the illegal votes that would be suppressed); It is predicated on the bigoted idea that minorities are too stupid or incompetent to be able to get an ID (the ID is often free or at a VERY low cost) and the further strange idea that demanding ID is racist if it is for something of national interest like voting, but perfectly OK if it's for: boarding a plane, renting a hotel room, using the public library, buying a beer, driving a car, having a bank account, having a job ......or ..... attending a Barack Obama campaign rally.
What about the millions of white hill-billies who, in the past, had no idea when Election Day was, but came out to vote because they DIDN'T want a "brotha" in the White House?
The populace should be as free to vote as they are at spewing disinformation, in which case is an absolute choice. Poking and prodding everybody to choose of the two parties(which have very little difference) is not an honest attempt to solve the problem. Yes, we could check both, or none, or make up a name but lets be honest, most people will not do that.
When you wrote: "Lets just reshape the districts, so we are certain that we still have a republican majourity in said district. In america before every election the 'ruling party' reshapes the voting destricts based on population data in the hope to 'manipulate' the outcome in their desire." did you realize that:
1. Importing massive waves of poor immigrants who do not speak the language and are statistically proven to vote overwhelmingly for the political party that keeps encouraging them in amounts to a national version of the same offense (i.e. politicians selecting the outcome of the vote by selecting the voters) ?
- and -
2. Calling for mandatory voting (which would drive-up the number of poor and ill-informed voters who currently do not care enough to inform themselves and participate and are statistically more likely to vote for the party that wants to force them to the polls) is just another version of the same sin (politicians manipulating the voter pool in order to pre-determine the results of elections in their favor) ?
"Everybody should vote" sounds so nice and idealistic - but if the result is that a tidal wave of spring-break-style morons showing up at the polls knowing NOTHING about the issues, the candidates, their plans, the economy, international matters, national security, etc and armed only with the words of some rabble-rouser in their community who told them which way to vote in order to "get more free stuff", then the result could be disasterous. The entire middle east is a mess now, in part because simpletons voted in a president who promised to pull out of the wars (without worring about what that candidate's plan would produce), and he felt compelled to fulfill THAT promise since he'd won on it but without a strategy (since he'd NOT won on any). That campaign was so bereft of serious discussion of details (the voter pool was presumably too uninterested) that NEITHER candidate felt compelled to offer any detailed plans for the middle-east). All that "free stuff" ill-informed voters selected has nearly DOUBLED the national debt in only 6 years (I guess math is just too tough for Mr Obama's base voters)
I might be more compelled to vote if i got a better sticker. Maybe make it a metal pin.
I have to imagine that mandatory voting would simply replace our current system with a human-powered random number generator...
either that, or folks will skew towards the top/bottom/middle option. I could see a lot of candidates changing their names to Aaron Aabraham and such...
What I don't see happening is a large impact in voter turnout: http://www.idea.int/vt/images/...
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
"None of the above" gets the most votes then none on the ballot can appear on the re-vote ballot.
I doubt it would work the first time. For just as you describe.
However, the new group of 80% of the population will get to see what happens when the person/team they voted for trashes the office, lies to them, treats them as garbage, etc. The new voters can no longer sit on the fence, as they have always done so, and bitch and complain about politicians and politics. Because now, it is their fault. They voted for them.
So next time, more of them will pay attention to the details that affect them. Hopefully, eventually, they start to think beyond themselves.
.
Why not *give* something to the people who do vote. Ignoring the fact that there is no practical way to enforce a mandatory voting scheme (seriously - you are going to try to fine and/or imprison 63% of the population?
I think the politicians have to take a good, hard, long look in the mirror and think about whether perhaps *they* are the problem, not the voters... I think most people have come to realize that their vote *doesn't* matter. When the people with money are buying the votes of thousands of people, casting a single vote is immaterial. Heck, just look at Hawaii - many people there don't bother to vote because by the time the polls are open in Hawaii many of the issues are already decided (meaning, even if everyone in Hawaii voted the same way it wouldn't change the outcome). I think the voters have also realized that voting is irrelevant when the elected officials then proceed to go behind closed doors with the lobbyists and make policy decisions that the voters have no say in.
Its like our jury system. The lawyers and judges try to tell people that they can decide important legal issues, but when a significant number of people make a decision about the legal jury system by not showing up for jury duty, they turn a blind eye to *that* decision. If the politicians want to complain about voter turn-out, perhaps they should do something about the very valid reasons why 63% of the population has decided that it is a waste of their time.
So you see, I'm totally against this.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If we used Range Voting [rangevoting.org] instead of plurality voting
Damn, just when I thought I'd seen every stupid voting idea. No doubt it's better than plurality voting, but take their Olympic scoring example: Ever notice how all of the judges tend to score from 9.0 to 10.0? If one judge decided to score from 0.0 to 10.0 instead, his vote has 10x the power of the other judges. So anyone who really prefers their #1 candidate to their #2 candidate is forced to give their #1 candidate far more points, which then means that in the event their #1 candidate lacks sufficient support, their #2 choice is essentially ignored. Providing more information on the ballot doesn't necessarily lead to a better result.
Anyway, Condorcet is provably the best algorithm, so I don't know why people keep trying to promote alternatives, in particular that bastard Instant Runoff method.
The best I can figure is that the mathtards are so obsessed with resolving "condorcet ambiguities" (what any sane person would simply call a "tie") that they've devised countless ways to resolve them that make the algorithm hideously complex for no real benefit whatsoever, to the point that anyone who looks at Condorcet starts reading about these various methods and can't understand any of them and so half of them say "fuck it" and look for another algorithm to throw their support behind while the other half just pick whichever method has the coolest name (like Schwartz sounds cool) and support that.
Condorcet is dead simple if you just keep the BS out of it. Say you got four candidates, A, B, C and D. Everyone ranks these four morons in order of preference. To find the winner, you run "virtual elections" where each candidate goes one-on-one against each other, and in each "virtual election" the candidate who gets the vote is whichever candidate is ranked higher on each ballot. As long as there isn't a tie (and there won't be a tie in real life) the result is that one candidate will win all of their one-on-one virtual elections. Another candidate will win all except for the one they lost to the overall winner. Another will win all except for the two they lost to those first two candidates. The last candidate will have lost all of the one-on-one virtual elections.
As for those "condorcet ambiguities," who cares? How often do ties occur in real life? How do we resolve ties presently? You don't know because it doesn't happen. ...and whatever method we choose is just fine, just draw lots or whatever, since when we prefer two candidates equally, we're equally well off regardless of which is declared the winner, so it just doesn't matter, and so there's no point in devising a hideously impossible-to-understand algorithm to try to extract some additional information about voter preference from the ballots. Indeed, the nicest thing about Condorcet is that there's no advantage to voting in any way other than to specify your true preferences, but all of these "condorcet ambiguity" resolution algorithms destroy that aspect.
(...and since I'm sure some mathtard will insist that I don't understand that the "a>b, b>c, c>a" nature of a "condorcet ambiguity" isn't just a tie, I must state that I understand just fine what the hell it is. It's a tie. Just because it's a pecular and interesting result doesn't mean it's an "ambiguity," as there's nothing ambiguous about it. The population simply has no preference between those candidates. So just pick one at random and stop insisting that "OMG there's so much fucking data in these ballots surely there's a way to improve the algorithm such that it cannot produce such results." Those results aren't a problem, they're the correct answer. Just because you don't like the answer is no reason to go and fuck up the process in order to make it give a different answer. In particular, every attempt at removing such answers from the realm of possibilities just makes what is already an algorithm that not a lot of people unders
Democracy would be a good idea first.
If it's not Proportional Representation (PR), it's not democracy.
Sadly, USA is not a democractic country in spite of their silly belief that they are.
work in progress
I vote occasionally. Here are some things that would encourage me to vote more:
1. Ranked ballot voting, top 3 choices. This would shut everybody up. Now your vote counts.
2. Online/electronic absentee ballot. I'm lazy. So are most people.
3. Transparency and availability of easy-to-read candidate data. Most of the time I don't know any of the people on the ballot. I want a brief overview of the candidate's stances on core issues as well as record of their past accomplishments. It would also be nice if potential conflicts of interest were listed.
4. Make voting-day a national holiday. If it's a part of the culture, it gains permanent respect. Quality voting is essential to our future. Take the day off? Sounds good to me!
A hundred years ago, we realized that African-Americans deserved the right to vote.
Absolutely, and every person should be able to vote.
Once.
All of Europe for example, requires ID to vote so that each person can only vote once.
If you can't trust that people are only voting once, it's really hard to have a working democracy. ID is not about race, it's about rule of law, and other fundamental concepts that every other modern country already employs...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
President Choom needs to disabuse himself of the notion that we are his to command.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I am a US Army veteran. I did not fight and almost die twice so you could vote. I fought and almost died twice so you could not vote. America is all about choices and not voting is just as valid as voting. Stop speaking for military veterans. You don't know us, son.
Citizens have rights. They also have responsibilities, one of which is to vote.
I would like to know more....
OK, every two years then. How does that make a bit of difference? You just showed your ID to the lady at the store to buy your cigarettes and beer. Why the fuck is it a big deal to show the voting attendant? You paranoid people make no goddamned sense!
Seems like a good reason *not* to introduce it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The end of the Republican party. Normal people voting instead of crazy, obsessed people who have no life, such as elderly voters who watch Fox.
In many civilized countries, voters will receive a voter's card inviting them to vote at each election. To vote you show up with the card and it is matched with a list. In case of issues picture id may be required but that's extremely rare. When validated you get the ballot and do the actual voting.
How hard can that be?
Of course illegals with get no voter's card and cannot vote, but that's to be expected.
If you don't vote you'll have no say in the decisions made but it's all up to you. Making people vote by force will gain noting useful.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Wouldn't it be better just to spin a roulette wheel?
I don't see how, given the information provided us we can actually make an intelligent and informed decision as to who is better qualified to hold a job position we ourselves don't understand we can choose correctly.
From my experience, campaigns are little more that bitch slap matches similar in nature to a WWF interview with someone talking a lot of smack. We're really only assembling a team of gray haired wrinkle warriors who can battle with words against the other team.
It's hopeless.
If you want to have mandatory voting you should require a "None of the above" option on the ballot. That way everyone is required to go to the poll booth (or cast a postal ballot or whatever) but if you think all the candidates are a bunch of shysters then you have the option of deliberately not voting for any of them. I suppose spoiling your ballot achieves the same end, but there ought to be a formal option for expressing dissatisfaction with the whole sorry bunch. In university elections it was mandatory to have "Reopen Nominations" (Ron) on the ballot - I remember an occasion when Ron won, and they had to repeat the election with fresh candidates.
Voting in US elections today falsely legitimizes the Democratic-Republican regime which maintains a stranglehold on power in that country. If there were any opposition figures or parties to vote for, then that would be one thing, but in the complete absence of any opposition at all then mandatory elections are tyranny.
"Failure to vote is punishable by a fine in countries such as Australia and Belgium; if you fail to pay your fine in Belgium, you could go to prison."
Yeah, the ass backwards policies that has failed the public for decades.
I hate having to be forced to vote in my country.
I wish we didn't have to!
Smart people know that voting matters. If you force dumb ones to vote, the dumb people will have more say in society and how good is that in the end?
Example of Belgium can also serve as a good example of failure of voting to provide working government: Belgian elected representatives were unable to form a government for TWO years (589 days) in 2010-2011. Again, how normal is that? Would they have had better luck if the otherwise ignorant would not have voted?
What is an "Enforced Education Camp"? Sounds like part of a juvenile detention system.
As far as implementing the "universal competency of critical thinking"... I said no such thing and I don't think any sane person would think it is possible. You might as well pass a law making an above average IQ mandatory. It serves no purpose. (Hey! Let's pass a law making pi equal to 3! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... )
But you can expose people to the concept and process of thinking for themselves and lay out a framework for intelligent, skeptical analysis of ideas and the life around them. With the internet spewing stupidity at a higher rate then accurate, intelligent information we need to offer people the tools to deal with the bright, shiny bullshit that is waiting to inundate them.
This is the one downside to health care advances: the geriatric gentry like DICK Cheney will hang around far too long, doing out-sized damage to every facet of our existence.
The creative minds at South Park Studios answered this debate years ago best.
If you choice is between a douche and turd-sandwich, it's really not a choice. The only real choice is to remove your vote from the process.
That's the problem politicians don't understand, it's not the population that's the problem, but the politicians! How 'bout that, the fox blaming the hen for the troubles in the henhouse? The reason there's only 1/3rd of the population voting is largely due to the fact that the political process in this country is broken and corrupted beyond recognition, and there's nothing money nor 'voting' is going to change - "Career Politician" is a PC euphemism for "White-Collar Criminal".
Not all abstainers are uninterested. Some are opposed to the very premise of coercive authority. I personally abstain for the same reason an atheist doesn't attend church. In religion, an individual can assume one of four standpoints on the existence of god: god does exist; god does not exist; don't know or can't know; and don't even care to entertain the question.
An individual's standpoint on the notion of coercive authority is similar: consensus can validate coercion; consensus cannot validate coercion; don't know or can't know; and simply don't care. You have assumed that the majority of abstainers fall into the last category, and you are probably right. However, there are two other possibilities for abstainers (the second and third categories), and I will offer myself as a living example of the second type (consensus cannot validate coercion). We are rare, but do exist.
Logically, if you don't believe in coercion as a regular means to an end (as opposed to self-defense), you can't vote, because the entire purpose of voting is to (attempt to) justify coercion.
It will be harder to fool a majority of everybody than a majority of 50% who bother to vote. Just think about it, the people you fool WILL GO VOTE and the people you don't will either abstain or vote for the opposition.
When you notice the impact of impulsive people who don't care and pick major candidates is when you've gamed the public to the point where your election is so close that anything; including the weather, could decide who wins. The MORE people the more difficult it is to game the majority of the populace.
Majority rule does not produce the best results but it is the RESPONSIBILITY of the majority for how happy they are with their results. It is their fault if they are a bunch of sheep; you can't excuse yourself from civic duty as easily when you have to at least participate.
You have to be a moron to fall for the "right to abstain" argument. Everybody can go to vote and not choose any candidate or write in a joke candidate. But to argue Ayn Rand with the usual appeal to absolute freedom is ignoring a fundamental concept of civilization; your duty to society.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
What a great way to round up 20 million illegals and have them vote for democrats. Require voting but prohibit states from checking eligibility.
If the no confidence votes outweigh those for the fronted candidates then it is time to put forth new candidates and keep doing so until the no confidence vote no longer wins the election.
Politicians work in self-interest. If a politician advocates mandatory voting, it's because he believes it will cause him to win -- not because he believes it will cause him to lose!
Same goes for the "Rock the Vote" campaign and similar efforts. They do this because they believe it will give their side the edge, not because they believe it will give the other side the edge! People don't vote -- or advocate voting -- because they want to be subject to the demands of the opposition. They vote because they have an agenda, and that agenda is to gain the power of coercive authority over the opposition. If a person has no interest in gaining coercive authority over anybody (even by proxy), then logically, they will abstain.
Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016!
I was recently at a homeowners assoc. annual meeting. There were no pitchforks or tar and feathers and yet in person attendance was just over 50% and total (by proxy) over 70%.
When people care about something or some place and feel that their input really does count, they will be engaged.
When people feel it truly does not matter which shithead is elected to Congress or the White Hourse, turnout will be poor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pSh0VAVYn4
"Eat your words" Dave420 or prove me wrong http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (which you've failed TONS of times @ & you always ran from that completely FAIR challenge to you, just like the trolling weasel you clearly are...)
* Tell us: How do those words of yours taste flavored with the "bitter taste of SELF-defeat" & washed down with your foot in your mouth ramming them down your throat? R O T F L M A O...
APK
P.S.=> You called me ALL KINDS of names: Well, since you're technically incompetent & the above link will just prove it again? Live up to a fair challenge put to you (of course, a TROLL WEASEL like yourself never has, or will - & as usual, I win - getting to make a FOOL out of you publicly, yet again also, "bonus"... lol!)... apk
How about rather than compulsory voting a tax cut for all who vote. Nothing big, but something like 0.2% general tax-cut to anyone who votes so that it'll seriously make people think it'd be a nice idea to go cast a vote. And those who really don't give a fuck will know they made a conscious choice in not voting for the common good of all and accept the normal tax. Perhaps increase tax for everyone by 0.2% and for those who vote give them 0.2% tax deduction. Those millions who don't vote will then handsomely help fund the increased activity at polling stations.
"Do, or do not. There is no try." -Yoda.
It's worth noting, for how it may impact those hypothetical historians that Obama even now in the position of lame-duck president has the highest approval rating of any president in the second half of his second term for a hundred years - more than twice what Bush 2 had at the same time.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Obama got 95% of the black vote in 08. If you show me a stat showing 95% of hillbillies voted Republican, I will print out this slashdot page and eat it.
How about you leave me and my right to chiose for myself the F alone?
Here's a F'ing-idea: STOP LETTING CORPORATE $ INTO POLITICS in the first God damned place, asshole(s).
Vote - get a ticket to punch into your tax forms, so you don't pay the fine.
Don't vote - pay the not-voting fine.
Another way is to have an ID.
Which for some fluoride-in-our-teeth-reptilian-overlords-guns-eagles-freedom-aliens-mark-of-the-beast reason many here seem to be against.
Back in less crazy world, personal ID system is automatically a list of all living voters with their addresses and all.
Just compile a list of "no shows" and mail them their fines.
Instead of "I voted" stickers give out name+date+voting time+whatever tickets to cancel out accidental fines.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
others say that freedom also means the freedom not to do something.
I don't think you'll have to worry about that much longer. Freedom is disappearing at an astonishing rate.
After half a century of this I'm still not sure if it's a good thing or not, independents are more often than not fringe dwellers, radicals, and religious nutters.
Basic tests of "are you a crazy person?" and "how does government work?" for those wanting to be elected should fix a lot of that.
I mean... ANY job interview requires at least SOME qualification and basic sanity.
If you're gonna serve food to people someone might want to know do you plan on poisoning anyone or do you understand the concept of food - just in case you are an alien (from space) or a robot from the future.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
500USD to Vote! Thank you citizen! Stand up! Sit down! KNEEL Citizen!
Your mouth's full of your words you're eating http://slashdot.org/comments.p... after you were fairly called out and RAN. You *really* need to change your diet Dave420! Eating your words != GOOD NUTRITION!
Tell us, how does eating your words taste flavored with the bitter taste of SELF-defeat rammed down your throat since your foot's in your mouth?
Above all else: Get some manners, Dave420 - it's NOT POLITE to talk w/ your mouth full (lmao) of those words of yours you're eating, hahahaha.
(Amazing you can still talk your gibberish bullshit, actually, considering your mouth's full as you "eat your words" (lmao))
Your mouth's full of your words you're eating http://slashdot.org/comments.p... after you were fairly called out and RAN. You *really* need to change your diet Dave420! Eating your words != GOOD NUTRITION!
Tell us, how does eating your words taste flavored with the bitter taste of SELF-defeat rammed down your throat since your foot's in your mouth?
Above all else: Get some manners, Dave420 - it's NOT POLITE to talk w/ your mouth full (lmao) of those words of yours you're eating, hahahaha.
(Amazing you can still talk your gibberish bullshit, actually, considering your mouth's full as you "eat your words" (lmao))
would be to require it without requiring some clue of what you are voting on.
Now, at least there is a de-facto filter that only folks who are interested in something go and vote.
Presumably, they know something about who is running because they are interested.
For a democracy to work requires that folks are knowledgable and vote.
The alternative is what we have now.
But this proposal could make it even worse.
I wouldn't require voters to come to the poll, though I would compare every item on the ballet against the total number of eligible voters.
Examples
1. Should there be a bill to raise the sales tax by 0.05% to raise funds for Local Schools? A. Yes B. No - Default or no responses will be counted as B. No.
This means that not only would the bill supports need to convince 51% of the population to come to the polls but also to vote their way.
2. Who Should be the next President / Congress Man etc. A. Obama (D) B. Bush (R) C. Leave the position empty and forward the decisions that seat would have made to an open poll like example 1. - Default or no responses will be counted as C. Leave the position empty
Low voter turnout always tend to favor Republicans.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
People, if the prospect of the government forcing speech on you through voting or anything else doesn't scare the hell out of you my opinion is that you are a huge problem to the constitution of the U.S. consider another country. Maybe one that forces voting, or did and got rid of it. Consider the country that do and have required mandatory voting.
I vote every year and sometimes I really don't know what I am voting for, I study I read but I don't have 24 hours a day to investigate each applicant for my favor.
I suggest the polling should be easy and multiple and not have a lot of party politic and let the computers do it.
Forgive me I am an old dos guy its either yes or no. 1 or 0.
I think an honest vote is nearly impossible but approachable.
voting where I live is a huge pain in the keester and may take hours. That must be stopped! if you do that once and you are not a true believer you will never do it again. The blooming 18 and more high school Seniors get that the first try, and they have football practice home work and Fifi. Try to run that by them again.
So I suggest level the ballot to say 20-or 100 questions. All the candidates need to take a stance and the computer will assort who matches.
It goes to the poll and the people are asked do you want this or not and the computer will balance the people and candidate with the wishes of the people.
sample questions would be formed by an independent body and read like:
do you think homosexual people should be able to get married
do you want to spend money on enforcing marijuana laws
do you want to .....
I think darn right! If you really got the peoples opinion President Obama would be horrified at public opinion,and the difference between the current voting class and the new class he proposes
Tell your candidate to submit his fMRI/Integrity report before you vote for him;
Casteism
In democracy it's your vote in elections that counts; In FEUDALISM it's your count that votes;
http://m.timesofindia.com/indi...
Casteism
Maybe its time they also start counting the overseas ballots as well.
"Anything that is not prohibited, is mantatory."
Some people think they are qualified to run the world...
They are wrong.
Cowboy Neal!
And for all the brainwashed suckers (aka libertarians), who say they're all the same, and nothing ever changes:
unemployment insurance
Medicare (or don't you have parents?)
Medicaid
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
NASA puts a man on the Moon, 1969
Oh, that's right, if it doesn't involve you getting rich, and screw everyone else, it's not changing, and they're all the same....
And we keep reading of countries where they finally get to vote, and stand in line for a day or more, and then there was the in-all-the-media disgrace in France 10 years or so ago, when they didn't even have 72% turnout.... and you little shits think that tweeting's all you need to do, and not put your body where it matters....
Why, yes, I *do* vote, so if you don't, SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, and listen to me - if you don't vote, you ain't got no right to open your mouth. Voting is my license to bitch.
mark
I'm only OK with mandatory voting IF it was legally required, from Federal to Local elections, that ALL ballots had to include a voting option of "None of the above Candidates"!!
1) If you get a government check you shouldn't be able to vote. It's a clear conflict of interest. 2) We need a 1st, 2nd, 3rd choice voting system to give any third party a fair chance. Something also needs to be done about the Supreme Court making law instead of applying it but I'm not sure what the answer would be.
There are wonderful benefits behind the freedom of the voter to choose not to vote: (1) the person may use his lack of vote as a statement; (2) anyone who lacks the interest to learn about the issues is not someone whose opinions matter. I once thought that the Washington leadership were worse than fools and scoundrels. I now realize that such an view is far too dishonoring of fools and scoundrels.
"they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups. There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls."
And there's a reason you, Mr., President, want them to be forced to go to the polls. Same reason. You believe it gives you and your allies an advantage.
Of course, that presumes there is a concerted effort to keep these groups away from the polls to start with, and I dispute that, but we can disagree on that and still find fault with the initial proposal, that voting be mandatory.
Oh, and getting the money (or even the influence of money) out of politics by making voting mandatory? That was a sly joke, right?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Maybe this type of sweeping change to the way our voting happens should be put to the vote not just a decision made...
Hey, the canary in the coal mine was healthcare. Obama successfully passed a law requiring you to buy it, period, whether or not you wanted to, or needed it, or wanted it. You have no right to be surprised that he is already coming up with new things to require you to do. Yes, eventually he WILL require you to buy and eat broccoli. You can BET he will when the Broccoli Growers of America start donating to the Democrats. It was inevitable, and don't pretend we any longer have any "right" to NOT do something. We don't.
Not true at all. just google it real quick. Google approbal ratings and you will see that Reagan & Clinton both had higher approval ratings.
The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups
Pay everybody who votes $5 on their way out of the polls.
Wealthy people who already vote won't care, but those that currently don't will be delighted to get $5 for such little effort.
Also coffee and cookies for all who show up. Works for the Red Cross.
So hospital emergency rooms would be unstaffed on voting day?
In Australia, if we don't turn up to vote (we don't have to actually cast a vote) we get a small fine. In the USA if you don't turn up to vote, you get George W Bush.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
Absolutely not.
In theory, I want people to want to vote.
But hey, if you're too lazy/stupid to vote, better for me, since my vote then "matters more".
(BTW, I purposely don't vote on a lot of things, from propositions I don't know enough about or care either way, or most local political votes.)
To make sure we don't screw up our lives with STD's, unwanted pregnancies, or incorrectly putting condoms on phallic fruit we use sex education.
To make sure we treat all races, genders, and religions fairly we use multi-cultural education.
To help control the spread of AIDS in the drug community, we have programs to educate about drug use including the use of clean needles.
Why is it that when we are struggling to keep people from screwing up the country through complacency we move to adopt something that takes away their rights to act in a free society? Compulsory voting is just as immoral a concept as compulsory prayer in school. I don't see how detest one and not the other. We should be increasing the effort educate about the risk of not being involved in civics.
Forced voting is like forced insurance. More money and power in the pockets of insurance companies. More bargaining power to our "representatives".
No professional "representatives" is the solution. Internet voting makes this feasible. Make it so no single person can pretend to speak for millions of people over a matter different than the one elected for. We choose to elect people over gay marriage and church, and once in office those people choose to vote for entirely different pork based on entirely different "incentives". That's why people don't vote, they can only choose between professional politicians.
There are two parties, experts claim and I concur, because of the nature of US voting. The candidate with the most votes is elected. A bloc of voters will have more success trying to get their favorite sort of candidate elected as the nominee of one of the two dominant parties, than by starting a new political party. Typically. If a new party starts to get too successful to suit the two dominant parties of the era, one or both will adopt that issue, and the new party's voters will abandon it for candidates that have a better shot at getting elected.
There are occasional exceptions. The last major exception to this occurred in the 1850s, when anti-slavery voters could not get either the Democrats or the Whigs to take on slavery. That opened up an opportunity for a new party to form around that issue. The Republicans went from nothing to winning seats in the Congress and eventually the presidency in about a decade. The Whigs disappeared.
That's why there are two. But why those two?
Because laws, that's why.
In the late 19th century, there was a push in the states for government-printed ballots (among other bad ideas). Once that happened, government decides who is and who is not a "real" candidate, and which political parties are the "real" ones. Unsurprisingly, the laws passed by Democrats and Republicans made it very hard to start new political parties. (Well, it's unsurprising now.)
This had the effect of reducing participation in the political process -- you would simply not believe what Americans did for fun and civic involvement in the 19th century -- and election competitiveness. Voting is the limit for most people, and only about half even do that in the "big" elections. Few elections are close, which further makes voting unappealing.
This is documented in "Why America Stopped Voting" by Mark Lawrence Kornbluh. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... The statistical analysis parts are rather dry, but the descriptions of the political clubs of the 19th century more than make up for it. They were positively European in their zest for political constructions and group activities. (No giant puppet caricatures of political figures, though. I think.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
That's pretty much true, though there is an exception.
In my state (Missouri) a write-in candidate has to file a declaration of candidacy by 5 PM on the second Friday preceding the election, or the votes won't count. In an election with filed candidates on the ballot, that is.
If no one files for the position, all votes for write-in candidates are reported, and a winner could be chosen.
It's a major pain for the election board, apparently, as they have to verify that the winning candidate exists and is qualified to hold the office. (I don't know what they plan to do if someone named Michael Mouse is eligible to hold an office, and a write-in candidate named Mickey Mouse gets the most votes.)
Did I say "a winner could be chosen" and "the winning candidate"? In some races where no one files and there are write-ins, there's a tie. Then the fun begins.
For political party county committee positions, apparently it's up to the party's county committee to decide, at their first meeting after the election. That's how we did it. Not a problem for us, as the "photo finish" candidates didn't show up for the meeting. Maybe they did not know they got any votes.
Probably not a problem for the Democrats and Republicans, but for a different reason. Those county committee elections are a big deal for them, and those elections are hotly contested, at least in St. Louis County. Anyone who wants the position would file. No write-ins counted, in that case.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Voting should remain a right, not a requirement. What the US needs more is a change in political culture away from a two party system. I strongly suggest splitting up the Republican and Democratic parties along their bloc lines as well as having voters support other parties more. Keeping a two party system will ensure that Congress remains utterly dysfunctional unless one party has 2/3rd majority in both houses and a president from its own party to rubber stamp anything. A two party system is only marginally better than a one party system. Plus, term limits are direly needed, extend terms to five years and after that you are out for at least two term on both federal and state level in any position. Same needs to apply to Supreme Court judges, there are way too many old geezers on that panel who lost total contact to reality.
So what he was really discussing was "How do we make it easier to vote?" And that if everyone voted, things would really change â" that everyone voting would "counteract money more than anything."
He did say that mandatory voting, like some countries have, might be good in the short term simply to get people to the polls -- but that a better plan, albeit one that is long-term, is meaningful reform of campaign finance.
Make the election system proportional as well. At least for the house of representatives.
This will make it possible for some fresh blood to enter the politics.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Don't forget he followed up the most provably and objectively worst president since Reagan. That alone will catapult the way history reflects on him positively, even if he was a slightly less neo-con version of the previous guy.
The Mormon that actually had incredibly successful experience at being an executive would have been much worse that the guy that started his POTUS career supplying automatic weapons to the cartel that killed Brian Terry.
Australia has compulsory voting which I used to dislike since I reasoned if the only viable leaders to choose from are both unacceptable it should be possible to show your contempt by voting for neither. I don't hold that view any more because it is easy to spoil a ballot paper so your vote will not count but you still get ticked off as having voted. The advantage is it makes fraud (e.g. ballot boxes that go missing from wards where the majority of votes will likely be for the candidate the fraudster disapproves of or vote stuffing were votes are maybe cast by the deceased or people who never existed) harder to hide. It will not stop fraud but it helps to contain it.
I doubt most of the posters claiming to know why most people don't vote in many U.S. elections have any empirical data to back up what they are saying.
If the problem is that the parties are too much alike, why are there typically fewer votes cast in primaries? Primaries give voters who do align themselves with a party a chance to choose that candidate. Voters, especially in non-Federal elections, may have a better chance of knowing things about the candidates.
Personally I don't think voting should be mandatory, withholding one's vote is a legitimate choice. (However being unwilling to explore the potential consequences of your action/inaction is not the same as a considered decision to stay home on voting day.)
In my opinion mandatory voting would ultimately increase the influence of money. All the persuasive tools that are at play in the supermarket and advertising world will be brought to bear against currently non-voting/consumers. "Product placement" of candidates in movies and television anyone?
Most ballots offer a chance to write in a candidate. One can write in "None of the above." I've only felt compelled to use this option once.
As a test of theories as to why people don't vote why not try out ballot options such "I am not selecting a candidate because it wouldn't make any difference," "I am not selecting a candidate because none of them reflect my views" or just plain "I am not selecting a candidate." I doubt that this opportunity to use the system to condemn/complain about the system would dramatically attract new voters.
Mandatory voting would require some sort of ID to track who has voted. According to the news media and the Democrat party this would be racist.
Money? Nope that will just mean people who care nothing about politics will be forced to check a box based on whatever ads they watched the most of - payed for by money. These people can't be bothered to vote, and certainly can't be bothered to be informed citizens. This would completely drown out the voice of informed citizens, and cede everything to money.
Obama just sees the short term 'gain' of groups that he thinks would vote for Democrats being forced to vote more. As if 'Democrat' or 'Republican' are even a coherent things.
...
Nearly everybody votes. If you don't you can get fined. Most Australians do not see much wrong with it and it does result in higher participation I am sure. If you wish to abstain, you can just vote for Skippy the Kangaroo, draw flowers on your ballet, whatever. But you have to pick up the ballet paper, get crossed off the list, and go into a booth.
As for minimum free basic healthcare and gun control, no-one outside the US understands why you have such a problem with this when what you do now so clearly fails.