cypherpunks-digest V1 #13266
Tim Benham
pique at netspace.net.au
Thu Apr 29 15:00:10 PDT 2004
> Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:20:44 +0000
> From: Justin <justin-cypherpunks at soze.net>
> Subject: Re: Fact checking
>
...
> > Australia has mandatory voting. I think that's what you're arguing
> > against
>
> I'm arguing against any sort of coercion - whether it's a loss of
> rights, being stuffed in a prison, or being beaten with a stick. You
> consider voting in Australia to be mandatory? The punishment is a fine,
> different from loss of suffrage but not necessarily more serious.
I'm not in favor of compulsory voting, but you wont have to pay the small fine
unless you're too lazy to think of an excuse. Last time I got off by claiming
my foot was too sore to walk to the polling station. In practice it's only
compulsory to either apply for an absentee vote or attend a polling station
on election day and get your name crossed off a list. You can bin the pieces
of paper the official gives you.
The effect is that about 70% of voters just turn up and vote the way "their"
party tells them to vote. This number is in secular decline.
I think what's needed is a "None of the above" option on the ballot. If "None
of the above" won a majority then the office would be left vacant. (We
actually had this system for student elections at my alma mater) Non-voters
obviously aren't sufficiently attracted to any of the candidates to bother
voting, so they should be counted as votes for "None of the above" (but not
this part -- they were doing well to get a 10% turn-out for a student
election). Pretty soon we'd have no government.
cheers,
Tim
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