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The Death of Competition in American Elections
- boredatoms 2y agoAustralia has a solution for this: mandatory voting
- scotty79 2y agoHow can they signal mistrust towards all of the candidates?
- tanaros 2y agoYou can submit a blank ballot. Since the ballot is secret, compulsory voting merely verifies that you got a ballot and submitted it, not that you filled it out correctly/completely.
- amenhotep 2y agoWhich is, incidentally, the exact same way you do it in a non-compulsory voting system. Spoiled ballot is a signal that you cared enough to get off your arse and vote and deliberately chose none of the candidates, so you might be reachable with the right message. Not voting is just a signal of general apathy, not very tempting to engage with. 63.9% turnout is just business as usual, but - if you ask me - 36.1% of ballots being spoiled would precipitate a sea change in the political landscape.
- jfengel 2y agoThere are other reasons for not voting besides apathy. Many people would like to vote but are deterred for a variety of reasons: they have to work, or take care of children, or they're afraid of being arrested. A common tactic is to put up posters telling people that they can't vote if they owe child support. An alternative would be a national holiday rather than mandatory voting. Either way, I'd like to see voting made easier.
- euroderf 2y agoSo if blank ballots win in a contest for a particular political office, does that mean that that office is a candidate for the chopping block ? I would hope so.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoDoes it also have the option to legally chose something like: You're all insane! Go die in a fire!, so that the vote is counted, but not for any of the grifters? Meaning 90% of people voting like that, leaving 10% so called "legitimated" candidates, government falls flat, just like that. Repeat until stability emerges...
- boredatoms 2y agoYou’re not required to submit a correctly filled out vote, so you can submit a spoiled ballot, and sometimes theres a candidate who is there to sweep in the ‘none of that’ votes Most people do actually vote correctly though and it drowns-out the special interests
- SlightlyLeftPad 2y agoI love the idea actually.
- cantrecallmypwd 2y agoIt's that or sortition.
- silexia 2y agoUnpopular opinion: Only those who truly care and spend the time to research issues and candidates should vote.
- jfim 2y agoThe problem with that is that there's x% of the voters that won't count, and parties would argue about the correct value of x interminably, especially if the value of x determines who is the winner of the election. That can also end up like the "literacy tests" that were used to disenfranchise certain voters based on their skin color.
- cantrecallmypwd 2y agoWe're putting too much focus on popularity and celebrity candidates, and then masses of uneducated people (compared to the knowledge of average Europeans) pseudo-vetting clowns. Instead, we should have a large pool of vetted potential candidates (drawn from, say, all lawyers, architects, professional engineers, doctors, and similar professionals) who are chosen at random through sortition to fill the most contentious roles for 2 years, one and only one time. The roles then become functionary administrators like city managers, but on a larger scale. No more political parties, no more plutocracy, no more drama.
- werrett 2y agoThis is the exact opposite of what you should do. More disenfranchisement means more focus on rage bait / single issues that will rile up your side and juice your participation a little more (see ‘guns’, ‘pro-life’, ‘her emails’, et al). This pushes the parties to extreme opposites. If you have compulsory voting, as suggested down thread, then that rump of casual voters dampens the extreme views and ends up pulling the parties towards the middle. Lots of “well there’s hardly any difference” swing voters. Parties do still end up competing on differences (‘gay marriage’, ‘immigration crack downs’) but extreme or patently false views are punished (‘jan 6 was a peaceful protest’). The argument against compulsory voting is it slows ‘political innovation’ and drives a degree of apathy (‘there’s no difference between the bastards’). Minor parties and things like Preferential Voting can help address.
- LocalH 2y ago