On November 06 2012 11:07 sc2superfan101 wrote: [quote] but for what purpose, other than to satisfy the rather vague principle of "majority should mean majority", would we actually encourage voter turnout? if it does not lead to objectively better results than why should it be called the objectively better system?
If your preferences are served by continuing with the status quo, your argument is rational on a personal advocacy level. The problem is that for many people in this majority of non-voters, the current political order does not suit them, but they do nothing to change it. If we are going to call this a democracy, more votes and more turnout make it more legitimate. If that isn't a respectable goal to you, then we once again are at a point of departure. Rule by a minority elite is not true democracy.
how does higher turnout make it more legitimate?
is the systems legitimacy not based on the actual benefit of the system to the citizen? why would it's legitimacy be based on how many people decide to take part in the voting, and not on how free and prosperous those people are?
"true democracy" is a very strange term, again much discussed in Buckley's work, Up From Liberalism (I highly suggest you read it). one should assume that democracy, in truth, is a system by which one votes for ones government. a populace of three thousand where only two people choose to vote is as much a "true democracy" as any other in that sense.
Not everyone in this country is 'free and prosperous.' Especially not the second part of that slogan.
of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
Isolate why having more people vote is bad.
To clarify why I am going at this this way: even if things are going fine now, why is encouraging more people to vote uniquely bad. If you are confident in the system and how things are going, more people voting shouldn't drastically change things (but if it does, then the status quo wasn't actually satisfactory to the voting populace). However if the true basis for this argument is what I think it is, that we assume people who do not vote are stupid and aren't worth giving rights and popular sovereignty to, then the net detriment is the fact that we give these commoners the right to vote. And in this case, 'democracy' is a sham.
So true and right, but what else can we expect from Carlin
Well, it's obviously the opposite of true and right. If you vote for someone and they act like shit, you have a right to complain because they betrayed your trust. If you sit in your house and do nothing, you have no right to complain since you accepted anything, and you got something, so you should be satisfied no matter what.
On November 06 2012 20:43 Tobberoth wrote: Question is, do the US system work like the Swedish one, where there's a difference between a deliberate blank vote and a skipped vote? The way it works in Sweden is that when you vote, you can decide to deliberately NOT cast a vote, by writing so on the note. This means, you specifically vote for no one, and no one gets your vote. However, if you simply do not go out and vote, you're put into a mass of "non-voter votes" which are distributed according to a system.
Which basically means, if you do not go out and vote, you're being dumb as shit and it encourages people to actually go vote.
Yes you can cast your ballot completely blank. You can also pick and choose what you want to vote on. Only thing that would spoil the ballot: writing your name on it (no longer a secret ballot), voting for more than allowed, and few other things made famous in the 2000 elections like whether your vote was clear or not.
So true and right, but what else can we expect from Carlin
It's actually wrong, because it assumes everyone voted for the guy to be in office and thus cannot complain because their actions enabled it.
You can't tell proactive people they have no right to complain because they were proactive. It's the people who cynically sit at home and don't vote, who have no right to complain due to decision to be removed from society.
Ironic coming from me, but to be honest; I've seen this video too many times and it gets annoying. There's an outer layer of hilarious truth that he's saying, but it's been used so many times that it's starting to peel.
Coming from where I am voting seems silly to me since most of the time is just a struggle for power between 2 very corrupt parties. Arguably, I don't have that much of a clue about the candidates in US but still... it does kinda seem like voting means "picking someone", and when you have to pick between 2 pieces of shit, well most of the time it doesn't matter... leave it to the folks that will bother walking to the voting center.
On November 07 2012 00:25 Aterons_toss wrote: Coming from where I am voting seems silly to me since most of the time is just a struggle for power between 2 very corrupt parties. Arguably, I don't have that much of a clue about the candidates in US but still... it does kinda seem like voting means "picking someone", and when you have to pick between 2 pieces of shit, well most of the time it doesn't matter... leave it to the folks that will bother walking to the voting center.
The democratic solution to having two shitty parties is not actually to ignore democracy, it's to create your own party. Might seem like a weird solution to Americans since they obviously realize a new party won't make a dent, but look at other countries and you'll see having more than 2 parties is definitely viable.
So yeah, instead of whining about there only being two terrible parties, go make new ones.
On November 06 2012 11:10 itsjustatank wrote: [quote]
If your preferences are served by continuing with the status quo, your argument is rational on a personal advocacy level. The problem is that for many people in this majority of non-voters, the current political order does not suit them, but they do nothing to change it. If we are going to call this a democracy, more votes and more turnout make it more legitimate. If that isn't a respectable goal to you, then we once again are at a point of departure. Rule by a minority elite is not true democracy.
how does higher turnout make it more legitimate?
is the systems legitimacy not based on the actual benefit of the system to the citizen? why would it's legitimacy be based on how many people decide to take part in the voting, and not on how free and prosperous those people are?
"true democracy" is a very strange term, again much discussed in Buckley's work, Up From Liberalism (I highly suggest you read it). one should assume that democracy, in truth, is a system by which one votes for ones government. a populace of three thousand where only two people choose to vote is as much a "true democracy" as any other in that sense.
Not everyone in this country is 'free and prosperous.' Especially not the second part of that slogan.
of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
I'm not arguing with your statistics but querying your final point.
What do you mean by "every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP"? Do you mean to say that having more people wishing to vote would take the day off work and thus cost the country money? In the UK Polling stations open in the evening so people can usually attend these (though sometimes they get full which is another matter), this together with postal voting systems (though possibly subject to manipulation), I do not see how having a higher turn out will directly impact upon a country's daily GDP.
I think the key issue is that by aiming for a higher turnout, it is hoped that the populus will have gained a greater knowledge of politics - as if the imperative 'go out to vote!' will promote an intelligent investigation in to who to vote for - yes, a slim, but a hopeful attempt nonetheless.
But don't lose sight of the fact that the main motivation is that the winning party can claim, whether rightly or wrongly, greater legitimacy for their victory if more people turnout to vote.
That was a mistake on my part. In SA, voting takes the entire day so election day is a public holiday. I did not realise that the US voting system was efficient enough to handle the millions of voters in the hours before and after work.
On November 06 2012 11:10 itsjustatank wrote: [quote]
If your preferences are served by continuing with the status quo, your argument is rational on a personal advocacy level. The problem is that for many people in this majority of non-voters, the current political order does not suit them, but they do nothing to change it. If we are going to call this a democracy, more votes and more turnout make it more legitimate. If that isn't a respectable goal to you, then we once again are at a point of departure. Rule by a minority elite is not true democracy.
how does higher turnout make it more legitimate?
is the systems legitimacy not based on the actual benefit of the system to the citizen? why would it's legitimacy be based on how many people decide to take part in the voting, and not on how free and prosperous those people are?
"true democracy" is a very strange term, again much discussed in Buckley's work, Up From Liberalism (I highly suggest you read it). one should assume that democracy, in truth, is a system by which one votes for ones government. a populace of three thousand where only two people choose to vote is as much a "true democracy" as any other in that sense.
Not everyone in this country is 'free and prosperous.' Especially not the second part of that slogan.
of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
Isolate why having more people vote is bad.
To clarify why I am going at this this way: even if things are going fine now, why is encouraging more people to vote uniquely bad. If you are confident in the system and how things are going, more people voting shouldn't drastically change things (but if it does, then the status quo wasn't actually satisfactory to the voting populace). However if the true basis for this argument is what I think it is, that we assume people who do not vote are stupid and aren't worth giving rights and popular sovereignty to, then the net detriment is the fact that we give these commoners the right to vote. And in this case, 'democracy' is a sham.
To start, you're the one who says that people 'should' go vote, so you have to supply a good reason why they should do that. I'm not saying more people voting is necessarily bad, I'm saying that more people voting is very, very unlikely to be useful.
If voting adds no reasonable benefit, then encouraging more people to vote isn't good (it's also not particularly bad). It would be like encouraging people to stub their toes against a step. It's not particularly harmful, but it's an inconvenience with no clear benefit.
The big difference is, you're still basing your encouragement on the assumption that it can lead to some social change. Regardless of whether the status quo is satisfactory or not, encouraging more people to vote won't change the status quo. As has been argued already, even a turnout rate of 1% (of a perfectly random sample) will result in the preferred presidential candidate being chosen for the universe's expected lifetime (just so that it's clear, we're not talking about one "mistake" every fifty years, we're talking about one mistake every 10000000000000000000000000 years). When you reach a turnout rate of 60%, this should be true for the presidential election using an electoral system and all local elections.
All of this is based on the assumption that the people who vote are representative of the population as a whole. Given the sample size, this is a safe assumption if the sample is truly random. The question thus becomes if the voters are random or systematically biased in some way. Now, it's clear that the people who vote do differ systematically from the people who choose not vote. For one thing, the average voter clearly cares more about the election than the average non-voter. As such, we know that there is at least some form of systematic bias already going on. The quesiton is if this bias is a bad thing or not and whether encouraging people to vote decrease the bias.
Firstly, is the bias a bad thing? There are many ways in which the non-voting population can differ from the voting population, but the only characteristic we can be reasonably sure about is that they care less about the election (on average). There will be research on other characteristics they have, but I'll get to that later. Regarding participants caring less, it is better, by and large, if informed and interested parties make the decision, rather than all parties. To give you an easy example, imagine a school that is considering building an olympic swimming pool for it's students. If you just call a vote, then the people who have an interest in the topic (those who enjoy swimming, those who will have to pay for the pool, those who will have to build it, etc.) will be the most likely to vote and as a result, they will have the greatest say. The result should be that choice which benefits most residents gets chosen (let's assume, in this situation, it means the pool does not get built because it is too expensive). On the other hand, if you force the entire community to vote then you have people who will never use the pool or have to pay for the pool influencing whether the pool gets built or not. When disinterested parties are forced to vote, the results of the vote are almost always worse than if people could choose to vote. In this case, community members might think the pool sounds like a cool thing, without considering the costs or the number of people who will use it.
Just another quick example of the problem of forcing people to vote:
If Teamliquid ran a poll "Who is the greatest BW player of all time" with a list of viable candidates, you would expect a reasonably accurate answer. If Teamliquid forced ALL visitors to the site to vote, including those who never watched BW or even those who accidentally landed on Teamliquid, the results would be considerably less accurate. This is why most polls allow you to not make a choice, because an uninformed choice is often worse than no choice.
This is not to say that these people should not be allowed to vote. They have every right to vote. However, they also have the right to choose not to vote, and by choosing not to vote they say that they don't care enough or know enough about the election to wish to influence the result. Now, if the non-voting population starts getting screwed over, they will start caring more about the elections and they will change from disinterested parties to interested parties while other parties will become less interested. The point is, freedom to choose to vote (without social pressure) improves the effectiveness of a democracy.
The second question is, will encouraging people to vote decrease the bias? At this stage, I'm not simply talking about people who are disinterested in politics. There are other potential sources of bias. For example, first generation US citizens might feel like they have less of a "right" to vote, or some of the minority groups might feel that their interested are not represented and thus abstain from voting. This could result in the voting being biased away from those groups' interests. However, walking up to the average American and encouraging them to vote is unlikely to address this problem. If your sampling method is biased, increasing the size of the sample does not decrease the bias. What you would need to do is identify which population sub-groups are not being represented and find a specific solution to their problem.
So, to sum it all up, people should be free to vote if they want to, but also free to abstain if they don't want to vote. Placing social pressure on people to vote will simply result in worse decisions. Added to that, the chances that the elections will be changed by those who choose not to vote is very small, so you should not concern yourself over it.
On November 06 2012 11:19 sc2superfan101 wrote: [quote] how does higher turnout make it more legitimate?
is the systems legitimacy not based on the actual benefit of the system to the citizen? why would it's legitimacy be based on how many people decide to take part in the voting, and not on how free and prosperous those people are?
"true democracy" is a very strange term, again much discussed in Buckley's work, Up From Liberalism (I highly suggest you read it). one should assume that democracy, in truth, is a system by which one votes for ones government. a populace of three thousand where only two people choose to vote is as much a "true democracy" as any other in that sense.
Not everyone in this country is 'free and prosperous.' Especially not the second part of that slogan.
of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
I'm not arguing with your statistics but querying your final point.
What do you mean by "every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP"? Do you mean to say that having more people wishing to vote would take the day off work and thus cost the country money? In the UK Polling stations open in the evening so people can usually attend these (though sometimes they get full which is another matter), this together with postal voting systems (though possibly subject to manipulation), I do not see how having a higher turn out will directly impact upon a country's daily GDP.
I think the key issue is that by aiming for a higher turnout, it is hoped that the populus will have gained a greater knowledge of politics - as if the imperative 'go out to vote!' will promote an intelligent investigation in to who to vote for - yes, a slim, but a hopeful attempt nonetheless.
But don't lose sight of the fact that the main motivation is that the winning party can claim, whether rightly or wrongly, greater legitimacy for their victory if more people turnout to vote.
That was a mistake on my part. In SA, voting takes the entire day so election day is a public holiday. I did not realise that the US voting system was efficient enough to handle the millions of voters in the hours before and after work.
On November 06 2012 11:19 sc2superfan101 wrote: [quote] how does higher turnout make it more legitimate?
is the systems legitimacy not based on the actual benefit of the system to the citizen? why would it's legitimacy be based on how many people decide to take part in the voting, and not on how free and prosperous those people are?
"true democracy" is a very strange term, again much discussed in Buckley's work, Up From Liberalism (I highly suggest you read it). one should assume that democracy, in truth, is a system by which one votes for ones government. a populace of three thousand where only two people choose to vote is as much a "true democracy" as any other in that sense.
Not everyone in this country is 'free and prosperous.' Especially not the second part of that slogan.
of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
Isolate why having more people vote is bad.
To clarify why I am going at this this way: even if things are going fine now, why is encouraging more people to vote uniquely bad. If you are confident in the system and how things are going, more people voting shouldn't drastically change things (but if it does, then the status quo wasn't actually satisfactory to the voting populace). However if the true basis for this argument is what I think it is, that we assume people who do not vote are stupid and aren't worth giving rights and popular sovereignty to, then the net detriment is the fact that we give these commoners the right to vote. And in this case, 'democracy' is a sham.
To start, you're the one who says that people 'should' go vote, so you have to supply a good reason why they should do that. I'm not saying more people voting is necessarily bad, I'm saying that more people voting is very, very unlikely to be useful.
If voting adds no reasonable benefit, then encouraging more people to vote isn't good (it's also not particularly bad). It would be like encouraging people to stub their toes against a step. It's not particularly harmful, but it's an inconvenience with no clear benefit.
Then there is no net detriment to be had for society here. The good reason I provide is the exercise of rights and popular sovereignty.
However, they also have the right to choose not to vote, and by choosing not to vote they say that they don't care enough or know enough about the election to wish to influence the result.
I am also not forcing people to vote, I just think it is a good idea for them to do so, and if they want to vote then they should. This is perhaps the most fundamental misreading of what my advocacy is here.
I also isolate a number of net detriments existent in the status quo that have resulted from the current levels of low turnout, in particular the continued presence of the two-party consensus at the expense of alternate political movements.
Added to that, the chances that the elections will be changed by those who choose not to vote is very small, so you should not concern yourself over it.
Except where I show that the number of people who do not vote but could (and are already registered) far outnumbers the number of people who vote for the two majority party candidates. The potential for swing between the results of the two, or the emergence of an alternative is great if they all voted.
On November 06 2012 11:20 itsjustatank wrote: [quote]
Not everyone in this country is 'free and prosperous.' Especially not the second part of that slogan.
of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
I'm not arguing with your statistics but querying your final point.
What do you mean by "every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP"? Do you mean to say that having more people wishing to vote would take the day off work and thus cost the country money? In the UK Polling stations open in the evening so people can usually attend these (though sometimes they get full which is another matter), this together with postal voting systems (though possibly subject to manipulation), I do not see how having a higher turn out will directly impact upon a country's daily GDP.
I think the key issue is that by aiming for a higher turnout, it is hoped that the populus will have gained a greater knowledge of politics - as if the imperative 'go out to vote!' will promote an intelligent investigation in to who to vote for - yes, a slim, but a hopeful attempt nonetheless.
But don't lose sight of the fact that the main motivation is that the winning party can claim, whether rightly or wrongly, greater legitimacy for their victory if more people turnout to vote.
That was a mistake on my part. In SA, voting takes the entire day so election day is a public holiday. I did not realise that the US voting system was efficient enough to handle the millions of voters in the hours before and after work.
On November 06 2012 23:20 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 18:33 Daigomi wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:55 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:47 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:41 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:28 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:23 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:20 itsjustatank wrote: [quote]
Not everyone in this country is 'free and prosperous.' Especially not the second part of that slogan.
of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
Isolate why having more people vote is bad.
To clarify why I am going at this this way: even if things are going fine now, why is encouraging more people to vote uniquely bad. If you are confident in the system and how things are going, more people voting shouldn't drastically change things (but if it does, then the status quo wasn't actually satisfactory to the voting populace). However if the true basis for this argument is what I think it is, that we assume people who do not vote are stupid and aren't worth giving rights and popular sovereignty to, then the net detriment is the fact that we give these commoners the right to vote. And in this case, 'democracy' is a sham.
To start, you're the one who says that people 'should' go vote, so you have to supply a good reason why they should do that. I'm not saying more people voting is necessarily bad, I'm saying that more people voting is very, very unlikely to be useful.
If voting adds no reasonable benefit, then encouraging more people to vote isn't good (it's also not particularly bad). It would be like encouraging people to stub their toes against a step. It's not particularly harmful, but it's an inconvenience with no clear benefit.
Then there is no net detriment to be had for society here. The good reason I provide is the exercise of rights and popular sovereignty.
I am also not forcing people to vote, I just think it is a good idea for them to do so, and if they want to vote then they should. This is perhaps the most fundamental misreading of what my advocacy is here.
I also isolate a number of net detriments existent in the status quo that have resulted from the current levels of low turnout, in particular the continued presence of the two-party consensus at the expense of alternate political movements.
There's also no net detriment to society for everyone to stub their toes against a chair, but that doesn't make advocating for it a good idea. Also, you're excluding all the paragraphs I wrote in the middle pointing out why an uninformed/uninterested vote is a bad vote.
The exercising of rights is a terrible reason to vote. I've got the right of free speech as well, but you're not advocating that I walk down the street and insult people. It's the fact that the rights exist which is a good thing. We don't have to pointlessly exercise our rights to make them worthwhile. The popular sovereignity advantage doesn't work either. An election is a way of recording the will of the people. The will of all 360m people do not need to measured to know what their will is, just like you don't need to drink the entire glass of Coke to know that it's Coke. Any system that accurately measures the will of the people (like a perfectly random sample of 1,000,000 voters would do) has the advantage of popular sovereignity.
As you say, you're not forcing people to vote. However, the fact that everybody is constantly telling everybody else to "VOTE" is a significant form of social pressure (which is why you guys are doing it). You can't have it both ways: Either your advocacy will result in disinterested people voting, in which case it is unlikely to be good and may be bad, or it won't result in disinterested people voting, in which case it does nothing. At best, you're advocating that people stub their toes.
Added to that, the chances that the elections will be changed by those who choose not to vote is very small, so you should not concern yourself over it.
Except where I show that the number of people who do not vote but could (and are already registered) far outnumbers the number of people who vote for the two majority party candidates. The potential for swing between the results of the two, or the emergence of an alternative is great if they all voted.
Come on, how many times do I need to go over the stats. It doesn't matter if only 1% of all people in the US voted. Unless you can concretely show that the votes of the non-voters would have differed from those who did vote, then the vote of the 1% will give you exactly the same result as the vote of the 100%. Sure, it's possible for the non-voters to all vote Obama or Romney and change the result, but there's no reason to believe that that would be the case. It's the same as rolling a die 1,000,000 times and finding that, 66% of the time, the number is equal to 4 or lower. Sure, it is technically possible that by rolling the die another 99,000,000 times the distribution will change, and you will find that 5 and 6 come up 50% of the time, but the odds of that happening is almost exactly same as the odds of the universe ending while I type this.
On November 06 2012 11:23 sc2superfan101 wrote: [quote] of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
I'm not arguing with your statistics but querying your final point.
What do you mean by "every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP"? Do you mean to say that having more people wishing to vote would take the day off work and thus cost the country money? In the UK Polling stations open in the evening so people can usually attend these (though sometimes they get full which is another matter), this together with postal voting systems (though possibly subject to manipulation), I do not see how having a higher turn out will directly impact upon a country's daily GDP.
I think the key issue is that by aiming for a higher turnout, it is hoped that the populus will have gained a greater knowledge of politics - as if the imperative 'go out to vote!' will promote an intelligent investigation in to who to vote for - yes, a slim, but a hopeful attempt nonetheless.
But don't lose sight of the fact that the main motivation is that the winning party can claim, whether rightly or wrongly, greater legitimacy for their victory if more people turnout to vote.
That was a mistake on my part. In SA, voting takes the entire day so election day is a public holiday. I did not realise that the US voting system was efficient enough to handle the millions of voters in the hours before and after work.
On November 06 2012 23:20 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 18:33 Daigomi wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:55 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:47 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:41 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:28 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:23 sc2superfan101 wrote: [quote] of course not, but how would increasing the turnout of the vote alleviate this problem?
also, I would argue that the majority of the country are free and prosperous enough to grant the system a great degree of legitimacy. one cannot simply point to the exception and call it the rule. generally, the US population is free and prosperous by any standard which maintains historical relevance.
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
Isolate why having more people vote is bad.
To clarify why I am going at this this way: even if things are going fine now, why is encouraging more people to vote uniquely bad. If you are confident in the system and how things are going, more people voting shouldn't drastically change things (but if it does, then the status quo wasn't actually satisfactory to the voting populace). However if the true basis for this argument is what I think it is, that we assume people who do not vote are stupid and aren't worth giving rights and popular sovereignty to, then the net detriment is the fact that we give these commoners the right to vote. And in this case, 'democracy' is a sham.
To start, you're the one who says that people 'should' go vote, so you have to supply a good reason why they should do that. I'm not saying more people voting is necessarily bad, I'm saying that more people voting is very, very unlikely to be useful.
If voting adds no reasonable benefit, then encouraging more people to vote isn't good (it's also not particularly bad). It would be like encouraging people to stub their toes against a step. It's not particularly harmful, but it's an inconvenience with no clear benefit.
Then there is no net detriment to be had for society here. The good reason I provide is the exercise of rights and popular sovereignty.
I am also not forcing people to vote, I just think it is a good idea for them to do so, and if they want to vote then they should. This is perhaps the most fundamental misreading of what my advocacy is here.
I also isolate a number of net detriments existent in the status quo that have resulted from the current levels of low turnout, in particular the continued presence of the two-party consensus at the expense of alternate political movements.
There's also no net detriment to society for everyone to stub their toes against a chair, but that doesn't make advocating for it a good idea. Also, you're excluding all the paragraphs I wrote in the middle pointing out why an uninformed/uninterested vote is a bad vote.
The exercising of rights is a terrible reason to vote. I've got the right of free speech as well, but you're not advocating that I walk down the street and insult people. It's the fact that the rights exist which is a good thing. We don't have to pointlessly exercise our rights to make them worthwhile. The popular sovereignity advantage doesn't work either. An election is a way of recording the will of the people. The will of all 360m people do not need to measured to know what their will is, just like you don't need to drink the entire glass of Coke to know that it's Coke. Any system that accurately measures the will of the people (like a perfectly random sample of 1,000,000 voters would do) has the advantage of popular sovereignity.
As you say, you're not forcing people to vote. However, the fact that everybody is constantly telling everybody else to "VOTE" is a significant form of social pressure (which is why you guys are doing it). You can't have it both ways: Either your advocacy will result in disinterested people voting, in which case it is unlikely to be good and may be bad, or it won't result in disinterested people voting, in which case it does nothing. At best, you're advocating that people stub their toes.
Disinterested people will continue not to vote. If they are affected by my advocacy they are no longer disinterested but are actually interested in voting. Their vote and sovereign voice matters. Unless I am going around with a rifle forcing people to, in Plexa's example, vote or die, your criticism doesn't apply.
And even if it did, I would argue that because we term ourselves a democracy, a disinterested vote is still valuable out of principle. Continuing to term ourselves as a democracy and keeping our institutions open in such a way means we at some level care about getting more people to vote; otherwise we'd just limit the franchise to what you appear to think is a good idea and exclude everybody else. The true hypocrisy is saying people have a right to vote, they should vote, but they really shouldn't because they are too dumb to vote and would ruin the perfect world we created without them.
To turn your own advocacy on its head, arguing for a restricted vote or why low turnout is a good thing might make interested voters not care and fail to exercise their vote. I'd say that's a more clear net detriment than having more people vote.
On November 06 2012 11:28 itsjustatank wrote: [quote]
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
I'm not arguing with your statistics but querying your final point.
What do you mean by "every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP"? Do you mean to say that having more people wishing to vote would take the day off work and thus cost the country money? In the UK Polling stations open in the evening so people can usually attend these (though sometimes they get full which is another matter), this together with postal voting systems (though possibly subject to manipulation), I do not see how having a higher turn out will directly impact upon a country's daily GDP.
I think the key issue is that by aiming for a higher turnout, it is hoped that the populus will have gained a greater knowledge of politics - as if the imperative 'go out to vote!' will promote an intelligent investigation in to who to vote for - yes, a slim, but a hopeful attempt nonetheless.
But don't lose sight of the fact that the main motivation is that the winning party can claim, whether rightly or wrongly, greater legitimacy for their victory if more people turnout to vote.
That was a mistake on my part. In SA, voting takes the entire day so election day is a public holiday. I did not realise that the US voting system was efficient enough to handle the millions of voters in the hours before and after work.
On November 06 2012 23:20 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 18:33 Daigomi wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:55 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:47 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:41 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:28 itsjustatank wrote: [quote]
Because of the majoritarian voting systems in the United States, and the construction of its institutions in the Constitution, low turnout is simply unacceptable. A voting system that relies on 50% +1 winner takes all with a poor turnout rate isn't legitimate.
It may work, and the results might be pretty (to you, or the minority who benefit), but calling it democracy is insidious.
but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
Isolate why having more people vote is bad.
To clarify why I am going at this this way: even if things are going fine now, why is encouraging more people to vote uniquely bad. If you are confident in the system and how things are going, more people voting shouldn't drastically change things (but if it does, then the status quo wasn't actually satisfactory to the voting populace). However if the true basis for this argument is what I think it is, that we assume people who do not vote are stupid and aren't worth giving rights and popular sovereignty to, then the net detriment is the fact that we give these commoners the right to vote. And in this case, 'democracy' is a sham.
To start, you're the one who says that people 'should' go vote, so you have to supply a good reason why they should do that. I'm not saying more people voting is necessarily bad, I'm saying that more people voting is very, very unlikely to be useful.
If voting adds no reasonable benefit, then encouraging more people to vote isn't good (it's also not particularly bad). It would be like encouraging people to stub their toes against a step. It's not particularly harmful, but it's an inconvenience with no clear benefit.
Then there is no net detriment to be had for society here. The good reason I provide is the exercise of rights and popular sovereignty.
I am also not forcing people to vote, I just think it is a good idea for them to do so, and if they want to vote then they should. This is perhaps the most fundamental misreading of what my advocacy is here.
I also isolate a number of net detriments existent in the status quo that have resulted from the current levels of low turnout, in particular the continued presence of the two-party consensus at the expense of alternate political movements.
There's also no net detriment to society for everyone to stub their toes against a chair, but that doesn't make advocating for it a good idea. Also, you're excluding all the paragraphs I wrote in the middle pointing out why an uninformed/uninterested vote is a bad vote.
The exercising of rights is a terrible reason to vote. I've got the right of free speech as well, but you're not advocating that I walk down the street and insult people. It's the fact that the rights exist which is a good thing. We don't have to pointlessly exercise our rights to make them worthwhile. The popular sovereignity advantage doesn't work either. An election is a way of recording the will of the people. The will of all 360m people do not need to measured to know what their will is, just like you don't need to drink the entire glass of Coke to know that it's Coke. Any system that accurately measures the will of the people (like a perfectly random sample of 1,000,000 voters would do) has the advantage of popular sovereignity.
As you say, you're not forcing people to vote. However, the fact that everybody is constantly telling everybody else to "VOTE" is a significant form of social pressure (which is why you guys are doing it). You can't have it both ways: Either your advocacy will result in disinterested people voting, in which case it is unlikely to be good and may be bad, or it won't result in disinterested people voting, in which case it does nothing. At best, you're advocating that people stub their toes.
Disinterested people will continue not to vote. If they are affected by my advocacy they are no longer disinterested but are actually interested in voting. Their vote and sovereign voice matters. Unless I am going around with a rifle forcing people to, in Plexa's example, vote or die, your criticism doesn't apply.
And even if it did, I would argue that because we term ourselves a democracy, a disinterested vote is still valuable out of principle. Continuing to term ourselves as a democracy and keeping our institutions open in such a way means we at some level care about getting more people to vote; otherwise we'd just limit the franchise to what you appear to think is a good idea and exclude everybody else. The true hypocrisy is saying people have a right to vote, they should vote, but they really shouldn't because they are too dumb to vote and would ruin the perfect world we created without them.
Let me try to address your points again.
The fact that you are convincing people to vote on the last day does change them from disinterested to interested, but not in the way that I defined disinterested earlier. Regardless of whether they vote today or not, it doesn't change the fact that they have been disinterested in politics. The only part of them that changes is the part that decides on whether to vote or not. All the other characteristics stay the same. Also, as I mentioned, if their primary reason for voting is social pressure, they are not voting based on what's best for their country, they are simply voting.
Furthermore, you seem to have a misconception regarding what a democracy is. A democracy is about having a say in the way that you are governed. It's not about forcing people to say how they will be governed, it's about allowing them to say how they will be governed. There is no innate advantage to one additional vote in a democracy. The reason quantity of voting is useful is that the more people who vote, the more representative the democracy will be of the people's will. However, if the people's will can be perfectly defined with just 1,000,000 votes, having additional votes add absolutely no benefit. Now, I'm not saying 1,000,000 votes is actually enough in the US, I'm simply pointing out that a vote carries no innate benefit and does not necessarily benefit the democracy. In fact, when people vote randomly, it actually undermines the ability of the democracy to fulfill the goals of the people which is why it's better to have voters self-select.
Furthermore, you've mentioned multiple times that I'm advocating that only smart/interested people vote. I never did this. I advocated that only people who want to vote vote. That has nothing to do with intelligence or political savvy and it has everything to do with people's choice. What I am saying is that allowing people to abstain tends to work out better for a democracy because those who are uninformed or uninterested choose not to vote. This is simply a positive externality of giving people the freedom to choose and I never suggested that such a system should be enforced. As mentioned earlier, this system is self-regulating as well, which makes it even more effective.
On November 07 2012 01:12 itsjustatank wrote: To turn your own advocacy on its head, arguing for a restricted vote or why low turnout is a good thing might make interested voters not care and fail to exercise their vote. I'd say that's a more clear net detriment than having more people vote.
Just to make it clear, I never argued for a restricted vote. I also never encouraged people not to vote. I simply pointed out the problems with encouraging people to vote which happened to highlight how low turnout rates can be beneficial.
On November 06 2012 11:41 sc2superfan101 wrote: [quote] but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
I'm not arguing with your statistics but querying your final point.
What do you mean by "every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP"? Do you mean to say that having more people wishing to vote would take the day off work and thus cost the country money? In the UK Polling stations open in the evening so people can usually attend these (though sometimes they get full which is another matter), this together with postal voting systems (though possibly subject to manipulation), I do not see how having a higher turn out will directly impact upon a country's daily GDP.
I think the key issue is that by aiming for a higher turnout, it is hoped that the populus will have gained a greater knowledge of politics - as if the imperative 'go out to vote!' will promote an intelligent investigation in to who to vote for - yes, a slim, but a hopeful attempt nonetheless.
But don't lose sight of the fact that the main motivation is that the winning party can claim, whether rightly or wrongly, greater legitimacy for their victory if more people turnout to vote.
That was a mistake on my part. In SA, voting takes the entire day so election day is a public holiday. I did not realise that the US voting system was efficient enough to handle the millions of voters in the hours before and after work.
On November 06 2012 23:20 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 18:33 Daigomi wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:55 sc2superfan101 wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:47 itsjustatank wrote:
On November 06 2012 11:41 sc2superfan101 wrote: [quote] but you've yet to show me why low turnout is unacceptable when higher turnout has no foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole. if the higher turnout led to more prosperity or could be shown to have a positive effect upon the citizen or society as a whole, than perhaps it could justify itself. however, without some benefit, there is nothing to justify a higher turnout. one cannot say that the justification for a higher turnout is the fact of a higher turnout.
democracy has almost never been universal (or never?) and we should resist any effort to redefine the word so as to mean something which it has never meant before. democracy is simply a system by which the majority opinion of the voting populace is followed. whether the majority of the populace is actually voting or not is irrelevant. Greece was a more pure democracy than almost any we have now, and even they excluded the vast majority of their populace from voting.
Your arguments are rooted in the belief that things are fine now and they work for you. This may or may not be necessarily true for the people underrepresented in the current voting system. The foreseeable benefit to the populace as a whole is the fact that more of the populace as a whole has a say in how they are governed.
I am not satisfied with something we term democracy but is actually rule by a minority, when the only barrier to achieving higher turnout is education. It is pure laziness on the part of society to accept the way things are now.
you are neglecting the fact that the only reason those people are "underrepresented" is because they choose to be underrepresented.
once again you have used the fact of higher turnout as justification for higher turnout. if it has no foreseeable benefit other than itself than I don't think it can be described as very necessary.
This sums it up pretty well in my opinion. So far, you've given no real reason why increasing the turnout is a good thing other than vaguely referring to how a democracy works. To me, if the results of 1,000,000 people voting is identical to the results of 150,000,000 people voting, the democracy is equally effective in both situations. Having a 100% turnout might make us feel better about the legitimacy of the voting, but it generally has no real effect. A perfectly random sample of 1m voters will give the same result (at least on the presidential level) as a sample of 150,000,000 voters every time. To give you the maths: The odds of a candidate who is preferred 50.5% to 49.5% losing in the popular vote when 1,000,000 people vote is 0.000000000000000000000000027 (or about once in every septillion years). Obviously things get more complicated once you add the electoral vote and municipal votes in, but a perfectly random sample of 5,000,000 voters will result in both preferred president and local politicians winning for as long as a the US exists.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased. However, assuming a statistical bias exists, it still leaves us with a multiple problems. Firstly, as was pointed out, the reason for a systematic bias is because certain groups of people choose to be underrepresented. It is perfectly democratic to choose not to vote and we shouldn't force these people to choose (that would be the same as having a scientific poll without a "none of the above"/"I don't know" option, which, without fail, biases the results). Secondly, as has been argued, if the current elections are biased, they are biased towards people who care and are informed about politics. This should result in an election which is biased towards the better presidential candidates, not worse, and as such is a good thing. Democratic elections are a means to an end and should not be confused with the end. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
From what I can see, motivating the average person to vote will have no effect on any election, local or national. In fact, it will probably harm the country more than it benefits it. In the UK, every day where the general population doesn't work costs the country 2.3bn GBP. In the US, considering the size of their economy, increasing the participation rate by 30% will cost the country roughly 7.5bn USD. That's a lot of money for no tangible benefit.
Isolate why having more people vote is bad.
To clarify why I am going at this this way: even if things are going fine now, why is encouraging more people to vote uniquely bad. If you are confident in the system and how things are going, more people voting shouldn't drastically change things (but if it does, then the status quo wasn't actually satisfactory to the voting populace). However if the true basis for this argument is what I think it is, that we assume people who do not vote are stupid and aren't worth giving rights and popular sovereignty to, then the net detriment is the fact that we give these commoners the right to vote. And in this case, 'democracy' is a sham.
To start, you're the one who says that people 'should' go vote, so you have to supply a good reason why they should do that. I'm not saying more people voting is necessarily bad, I'm saying that more people voting is very, very unlikely to be useful.
If voting adds no reasonable benefit, then encouraging more people to vote isn't good (it's also not particularly bad). It would be like encouraging people to stub their toes against a step. It's not particularly harmful, but it's an inconvenience with no clear benefit.
Then there is no net detriment to be had for society here. The good reason I provide is the exercise of rights and popular sovereignty.
I am also not forcing people to vote, I just think it is a good idea for them to do so, and if they want to vote then they should. This is perhaps the most fundamental misreading of what my advocacy is here.
I also isolate a number of net detriments existent in the status quo that have resulted from the current levels of low turnout, in particular the continued presence of the two-party consensus at the expense of alternate political movements.
There's also no net detriment to society for everyone to stub their toes against a chair, but that doesn't make advocating for it a good idea. Also, you're excluding all the paragraphs I wrote in the middle pointing out why an uninformed/uninterested vote is a bad vote.
The exercising of rights is a terrible reason to vote. I've got the right of free speech as well, but you're not advocating that I walk down the street and insult people. It's the fact that the rights exist which is a good thing. We don't have to pointlessly exercise our rights to make them worthwhile. The popular sovereignity advantage doesn't work either. An election is a way of recording the will of the people. The will of all 360m people do not need to measured to know what their will is, just like you don't need to drink the entire glass of Coke to know that it's Coke. Any system that accurately measures the will of the people (like a perfectly random sample of 1,000,000 voters would do) has the advantage of popular sovereignity.
As you say, you're not forcing people to vote. However, the fact that everybody is constantly telling everybody else to "VOTE" is a significant form of social pressure (which is why you guys are doing it). You can't have it both ways: Either your advocacy will result in disinterested people voting, in which case it is unlikely to be good and may be bad, or it won't result in disinterested people voting, in which case it does nothing. At best, you're advocating that people stub their toes.
Disinterested people will continue not to vote. If they are affected by my advocacy they are no longer disinterested but are actually interested in voting. Their vote and sovereign voice matters. Unless I am going around with a rifle forcing people to, in Plexa's example, vote or die, your criticism doesn't apply.
And even if it did, I would argue that because we term ourselves a democracy, a disinterested vote is still valuable out of principle. Continuing to term ourselves as a democracy and keeping our institutions open in such a way means we at some level care about getting more people to vote; otherwise we'd just limit the franchise to what you appear to think is a good idea and exclude everybody else. The true hypocrisy is saying people have a right to vote, they should vote, but they really shouldn't because they are too dumb to vote and would ruin the perfect world we created without them.
Let me try to address your points again.
The fact that you are convincing people to vote on the last day does change them from disinterested to interested, but not in the way that I defined disinterested earlier. Regardless of whether they vote today or not, it doesn't change the fact that they have been disinterested in politics. The only part of them that changes is the part that decides on whether to vote or not. All the other characteristics stay the same. Also, as I mentioned, if their primary reason for voting is social pressure, they are not voting based on what's best for their country, they are simply voting.
Furthermore, you seem to have a misconception regarding what a democracy is. A democracy is about having a say in the way that you are governed. It's not about forcing people to say how they will be governed, it's about allowing them to say how they will be governed. There is no innate advantage to one additional vote in a democracy. The reason quantity of voting is useful is that the more people who vote, the more representative the democracy will be of the people's will. However, if the people's will can be perfectly defined with just 1,000,000 votes, having additional votes add absolutely no benefit. Now, I'm not saying 1,000,000 votes is actually enough in the US, I'm simply pointing out that a vote carries no innate benefit and does not necessarily benefit the democracy. In fact, when people vote randomly, it actually undermines the ability of the democracy to fulfill the goals of the people which is why it's better to have voters self-select.
Furthermore, you've mentioned multiple times that I'm advocating that only smart/interested people vote. I never did this. I advocated that only people who want to vote vote. That has nothing to do with intelligence or political savvy and it has everything to do with people's choice. What I am saying is that allowing people to abstain tends to work out better for a democracy because those who are uninformed or uninterested choose not to vote. This is simply a positive externality of giving people the freedom to choose and I never suggested that such a system should be enforced. As mentioned earlier, this system is self-regulating as well, which makes it even more effective.
As I said above. If you don't want to vote, you don't have to. There is no pressure, coercive or otherwise, in my advocacy forcing people to vote. I just think it's a good idea to have more people vote if they want to and provide reasons and data as to why.
Furthermore, you've mentioned multiple times that I'm advocating that only smart/interested people vote. I never did this.
See:
On November 07 2012 00:42 Daigomi wrote: Regarding participants caring less, it is better, by and large, if informed and interested parties make the decision, rather than all parties. To give you an easy example, imagine a school that is considering building an olympic swimming pool for it's students. If you just call a vote, then the people who have an interest in the topic (those who enjoy swimming, those who will have to pay for the pool, those who will have to build it, etc.) will be the most likely to vote and as a result, they will have the greatest say. The result should be that choice which benefits most residents gets chosen (let's assume, in this situation, it means the pool does not get built because it is too expensive). On the other hand, if you force the entire community to vote then you have people who will never use the pool or have to pay for the pool influencing whether the pool gets built or not. When disinterested parties are forced to vote, the results of the vote are almost always worse than if people could choose to vote. In this case, community members might think the pool sounds like a cool thing, without considering the costs or the number of people who will use it.
As such you advocate an elitist conception of rule by minority, and it is simply something I cannot agree with. "It works out that people don't vote" is functionally equivalent to "It's better that people don't vote" because the implication is that if more people voted, they would ruin a status quo that you agree with.
On November 07 2012 00:42 Daigomi wrote: Regarding participants caring less, it is better, by and large, if informed and interested parties make the decision, rather than all parties. To give you an easy example, imagine a school that is considering building an olympic swimming pool for it's students. If you just call a vote, then the people who have an interest in the topic (those who enjoy swimming, those who will have to pay for the pool, those who will have to build it, etc.) will be the most likely to vote and as a result, they will have the greatest say. The result should be that choice which benefits most residents gets chosen (let's assume, in this situation, it means the pool does not get built because it is too expensive). On the other hand, if you force the entire community to vote then you have people who will never use the pool or have to pay for the pool influencing whether the pool gets built or not. When disinterested parties are forced to vote, the results of the vote are almost always worse than if people could choose to vote. In this case, community members might think the pool sounds like a cool thing, without considering the costs or the number of people who will use it.
As such you advocate an elitist conception of rule by minority, and it is simply something I cannot agree with. "It works out that people don't vote" is functionally equivalent to "It's better that people don't vote" because the implication is that if more people voted, they would ruin a status quo that you agree with.
I'm sorry but now you're just making shit up.
I never suggested a rule by minority. I suggested that people who are interested in ruling should rule while people who are not interested in ruling should not rule. I've said, multiple times, that everyone should be allowed to vote if they want to. If you want to talk about functional equivalence, what I've said is that people who don't want to rule should not be forced to rule. If you read my swimming pool analogy, I never once said that the elitist minority are the only ones who should be allowed to vote. I said that, because they are most interested, they would be most likely to vote. Since the vote doesn't affect anyone else and since no-one else knows anything about the situation, this is obvious.
And yes, "it works out that people don't vote" is functionally equivalent to "it's better that people don't vote," but you completely left out the context. The full context is "a democracy works out better if people who do not want to vote do not vote". Please tell me how that suggests there is some status quo that I am trying to protect? What would you prefer, a democracy where people are forced to vote? If not, then you prefer the same thing I do, a democracy where people who do not want to vote do not have to vote.
Also, the status quo argument is ridiculous. You've mentioned it twice now, and twice I've rebutted it. Having 100m people vote and 50m people vote are equally likely to maintain or change the status quo since they equally represent the will of the people. I'm not sure why you have trouble understanding this, but I'll use the Cola analogy again since that's the most obvious. Imagine you have a mystery drink placed in front of you: It is either beer or Coke. Perhaps after a tiny sip you don't know what it is. However, once you've had half the glass, you know that it's either a beer or a Coke. You do not need to drink the full glass to know that it is Coke. Also, no matter how many sips you take, it won't change what it is. It can either support the status quo (all the previous mystery drinks have been Cokes as well) or it can change the status quo (all the previous drinks have been beers), but drinking more won't change that.
Your example assumes a binary choice in politics, which, while existent in American politics, is not inevitable.
It also doesn't apply to the myriad of other choices in an election season, especially those that do not rely on simple majority voting rules, such as school boards, boards of supervisors, etc.
Daigomi, your assumption that voter turnout is irrelevant to the outcome of an election because adding more votes is unlikely to sway the election one way or another is wrong because it assumes that people who vote and people who do not vote would vote similarly if they were all forced to do so. In the US, the more wealthy and educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote, while the poorer and less educated they are, the less likely they are to vote. As poorer people (and minorities, who tend to be poorer) tend to be more Democratic than the middle and upper class (who tend to be more white), a system that included compulsory voting could result in very different outcomes.
That's an aspect I think I've ignored entirely in my analysis, and its totally my fault. Too focused on talking about prospects for third parties and voting institutions. Thanks for bringing it up.
On November 07 2012 02:34 Gheed wrote: Daigomi, your assumption that voter turnout is irrelevant to the outcome of an election because adding more votes is unlikely to sway the election one way or another is wrong because it assumes that people who vote and people who do not vote would vote similarly if they were all forced to do so. In the US, the more wealthy and educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote, while the poorer and less educated they are, the less likely they are to vote. As poorer people (and minorities, who tend to be poorer) tend to be more Democratic than the middle and upper class (who tend to be more white), a system that included compulsory voting could result in very different outcomes.
I've mentioned this in almost every post I've made so far. In fact, I spend about half of each of my posts discussing that very possibility...
My first post in the thread:
On November 06 2012 09:48 Daigomi wrote: The only situation in which I can personally see the benefit of having the non-voters vote is if there is some systematic factor dissuading a specific population group from voting. For example, before Obama it was possible that a large number of black Americans believed that none of the presidents would support them, resulting in a significant portion of the population not being represented (this is just an example, I have no idea if it black Americans really felt this way). However, as with the systematic bias, this is a very big assumption to make without having strong evidence supporting it. It also won't be fixed by motivating the average American to go vote.
My second post:
On November 06 2012 18:33 Daigomi wrote: As I mentioned in my previous post, the only real reason why it could be good for more citizens to vote is if the voting population is systematically biased ... Finally, and perhaps most importantly, motivating the average person to go vote will have no effect on fixing a systematic bias, should one exist. If the method of drawing a sample is biased, increasing the sample size won't decrease the bias. To fix a systematic bias, the causes of the bias must be identified and addressed.
My second last post:
On November 07 2012 00:42 Daigomi wrote: The second question is, will encouraging people to vote decrease the bias? At this stage, I'm not simply talking about people who are disinterested in politics. There are other potential sources of bias. For example, first generation US citizens might feel like they have less of a "right" to vote, or some of the minority groups might feel that their interested are not represented and thus abstain from voting. This could result in the voting being biased away from those groups' interests. However, walking up to the average American and encouraging them to vote is unlikely to address this problem. If your sampling method is biased, increasing the size of the sample does not decrease the bias. What you would need to do is identify which population sub-groups are not being represented and find a specific solution to their problem.
With that said, I think this is a more relevant discussion than the one we've been having up to now. As I've said (multiple times, in quite some detail) a systematic difference between the non-voters and voters is important to consider. However, I don't believe a general appeal to "vote," especially not on a gaming forum like Teamliquid, solves that problems. The reasons why these groups do not vote must be considered and addressed if we want to obtain a more representative sample of voters.
On November 07 2012 03:10 Gheed wrote: I haven't read this whole argument, I just skimmed through it and then read the beer and coke sipping analogy. Sorry if I misrepresented your posts
No worries, it's a valid argument and one which I think has more room for debate than just the pure stats. For example, I believe a specific effort needs to be made to fix any such systematic biases, but there are other solutions which could also work.
EPT
