hello, the election commision of india had a proposal to the govt. that the voter should be able to vote for 'none of the above'. Though one can predict that such a proposal will never be approved by the government, it makes a lot of sense. Is any other democratic country seriously thinking of implementing such an option? Sarath. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2004-09-06T06:22:29-0700, Sarad AV wrote:
the election commision of india had a proposal to the govt. that the voter should be able to vote for 'none of the above'. Though one can predict that such a proposal will never be approved by the government, it makes a lot of sense. Is any other democratic country seriously thinking of implementing such an option?
If someone would vote for "none of the above" rather than write in his/her ideal candidate, that someone is a lazy oaf. Everyone who writes in a candidate is voting "none of the above." The 50% of the U.S. population which doesn't vote is also voting "none of the above" in a way. There's a difference in that some non-voters may slightly prefer one candidate over another, but _assuming that everyone has an ideal candidate_ they'd be willing to go to the polls for, not voting is the same as saying all the candidates are significantly less than the ideal. - -- "When in our age we hear these words: It will be judged by the result--then we know at once with whom we have the honor of speaking. Those who talk this way are a numerous type whom I shall designate under the common name of assistant professors." -- Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Wong tr.), III, 112 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBPJbunH0ZJUVoUkMRAgGkAJ4k4tdjeAQ99GfccGpFWaxSNJlhHACgnjFp xvPFAlzIQeMLmRQ7/PfSZiE= =jcfW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Justin wrote:
On 2004-09-06T06:22:29-0700, Sarad AV wrote:
the election commision of india had a proposal to the govt. that the voter should be able to vote for 'none of the above'. Though one can predict that such a proposal will never be approved by the government, it makes a lot of sense. Is any other democratic country seriously thinking of implementing such an option?
If someone would vote for "none of the above" rather than write in his/her ideal candidate, that someone is a lazy oaf. Everyone who writes in a candidate is voting "none of the above."
The 50% of the U.S. population which doesn't vote is also voting "none of the above" in a way. There's a difference in that some non-voters may slightly prefer one candidate over another, but _assuming that everyone has an ideal candidate_ they'd be willing to go to the polls for, not voting is the same as saying all the candidates are significantly less than the ideal.
The difference being that in a system such as Sarad describes, if 'None of the above' gets more votes than any candidate, the election is declared void and a re-election is called (possibly excluding any of the candidates from the first round, depending on the details); hence, the 50% of the population who think 'they're all fvckers' have a reason to go to the polls. I've experienced such a system in action (within a student body) and it works well, provided you like your democracy to be loud and participatory. For this reason it's unlikely to be implemented by an incumbent government, though I guess it's possible an uber-populist like Chavez or Lula might consider it. W
I think the US state of Nevada has "None of the above" as an option, though I'm not sure the implementation of it. The Libertarian Party in the US always has NOTA as a candidate in internal elections, and sometimes NOTA wins and the job goes unfilled until either there's a new election with new candidates or some executive committee appoints somebody. At 09:57 AM 9/6/2004, Justin wrote:
If someone would vote for "none of the above" rather than write in his/her ideal candidate, that someone is a lazy oaf. Everyone who writes in a candidate is voting "none of the above."
NOTA's a bit different - there may be a large plurality of voters who don't like the major candidates, even if they don't agree on who else they want. In a election where you're voting for a party, like most parliamentary governments use, voting NOTA is telling the parties to run different candidates, so for instance you might want the Labour Party to win but you don't like Tony Blair so you vote NOTA in his home district. In candidate-based elections, you're telling the individual candidates that you don't like them. ---- Bill Stewart bill.stewart@pobox.com
participants (4)
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Bill Stewart -
Justin -
Sarad AV -
Will Morton