Interestingly, quite a number of countries have compulsary voting. According to this list, at least 15 countries have a fine for not voting, and in 3, you can actualy be imprisioned for it. This seems tantamount to handing out goodies in the voting booths.

As to your first point, there's little way to tell the difference between somebody voting randomly and somebody voting intelegently. I'm told that there are some statistical analisies performed to catch potential votebots, however I can't discuss the details (because I don't know them).

Well, to be pedantic, not all of the countries mentioned have compulsary voting. Belgium for instance require you to show up at the voting station, but you don't actually have to cast a legal vote. Still, it's a short list, most countries don't have mandatory voting, and it's certainly not uniformly accepted to be a good thing.

The article also links to http://www.int-idea.se/vt/analysis/Compulsory_Voting.cfm which points out some of the drawbacks of mandatory voting (random voting for instance).

Abigail

Well, the server on the business end of that link seems to be operating in full stealth mode at the moment, but the basic problem with mandatory voting is that a certain percentage of people don't give a rat's hind end and *you* *can't* *make* *them* care*. Consequently, since they won't ever take the trouble to vote intelligently (even for the lowest definitions of intelligence), any vote you force them to cast is random and so tends to favor the worse or less popular option. This wouldn't be a big deal if it were .05% of the population, but it tends to be somewhat higher than that.

Don't get me wrong, voting is good. You want everyone to know about their legal right to vote, to know what day is election day, and to know where they have to register (and by when) and where they have to show up on election day to vote. That's all fine. But (to paraphrase a certain infamous sports figure) if the people aren't gonna come to the booth, how you gonna stop 'em?

Bringing it back to Perlmonks... I don't think we have that great a problem, because the people who don't care are generally not going to spend a lot of time visiting the site in the first place. The XP "goodies" we're handing out for voting would generally not be a compelling thing for people who aren't really interested in the content of the site. I don't see it as a big issue here.

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Perlmonks rewards voting, and it doesn't discriminate between an "intelligent" vote and a "vote to get XP".

But any democracy who doesn't want to be become the laughing stock of the world doesn't hand out goodies in the voting booths.

Yeah, voters shouldn't have to be enticed. Humanity shouldn't have to be policed, either, but those systems exist. Necessary evils exist, so why encourage only the most egregious ones? Why shouldn't there be tasty baked lasagna, free for the taking if you do your civic duty?

Anyone that shows up at the polling location for the food instead of for the voting shouldn't be voting anyway. An uninformed vote is worse than no vote at all.


- apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

Exactly how well-informed do you think most voters happen to be?




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You are what you think.