Voting takes me 15 minutes on my way to the office. I’d resent another holiday that most people would use for vacation rather then voting.
As I’ve said on the boards many times, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with not voting. It’s an exercise in in choice. I’m completely fine with people staying home; if that’s how they want their opinion to be expressed, so be it.
I agree Eonwe- but I want to make sure that people who aren’t voting are not voting by choice, not because it’s too difficult or time consuming or relatively less important than getting the kids to school, or something like that.
I think that people should not have to sacrifice something else in their life to vote- or that that sacrifice should be as minimal as possible. I think absentee voting or extended hours/more locations (minimal-staff multi-location kiosk voting, for example- the way they do registration sometimes) would help this.
Is this a setup? Hoping someone will thinks it’s a good idea so that the OP can argue against forcing people to have to have photo ID’s to vote.
If not, carry on.
I think the opposite is actually a better idea. What if we left voting completely voluntary…but any election where fewer than 50% of the eligible voters participated is declared invalid. Make the candidates sell their position to enough people to reach the threshold, or they have to do it again. The second time at totally public expense - set, strict limits on spending that are ridiculously low, no PACs allowed at all, etc. Toss in “None of the Above” as a choice on the ballot, and now we have something!
In a free country there should be as few things as possible that we “make” people do. Voting is not one of them.
Why does anyone give a shit if I vote or not? It’s not any more of your business if I vote than who I voted for if I choose to vote. This is busybodyness at it’s worst.
You can’t make people care about something, no matter how hard you try. And to echo the others, I’d be completely happy with a 1% voter turnout if 99% of eligible voters were apathetic or uninformed.
As I recall, it’s true, and it’s because the people who don’t vote tend to belong to groups that typically vote Democrat.
This seems very wasteful. I say that the states should do like Oregon does, and just mail everyone a ballot. California (at least) already mails everyone a sample ballot, and an explanatory packet. I imagine many states do the same. Adding the actual ballot (or changing the “example” ballot into the real deal) would be simple, easy, and very cost effective. You could still have a few polling places for people who lost their ballots, or who don’t trust the mail, but the vast majority of the voting would be done offline. The return postage on the ballots should be covered.
We already have an excellent system for the distribution of paper in a (mostly) secure fashion. Why don’t we use it?
I am of the opinion that we should make it incredibly easy to vote, but we shouldn’t actually offer incentives for it (or punishment for not doing so). Anyone who doesn’t care enough about their opinion to fill out a piece of paper and drop it in a mailbox, I’d rather they didn’t vote.
There’s talk in the UK of making voting compulsory. I think it’s quite outrageous. Politicians blather about how it’s our public duty to vote, our forefathers fought for the right, etc, what they won’t understand is the simple fact that often there is nobody standing whom we consider worthy of our vote. The right not to vote is just as important as the right to vote.
What a great idea. Let’s turn it into a system of Brownian motion where a bunch of idiots just flip switches because they have to be there.
Odds are if you can’t be bothered to vote, you can’t be bothered to learn about the issues.
This post describes my views on the matter with 100% accuracy.
And this one as an addendum.
I am not a Republican (far from it), but to be fair, those measures also generally make voter fraud easier and are opposed for that good reason.
I agree that voter fraud is a common objection to lots of plans to increase the ease of voting, but the one stated as an example (motor voter) would not seem to increase ease of fraud and so I have trouble believing that hypothetical Republicans would oppose it on those grounds (or any grounds, really. What’s wrong with motor voter?).
In my opinion, this voter fraud thing is a bogeyman designed to mask turnout suppression in areas that don’t vote the way you want.
I’ve never seen any evidence that’s a significant problem for get out the vote campaigns; it’s just an excuse the Republicans have for suppressing potential Democratic votes, in my opinion.
I’m all for having
less people vote, if it meant the remaining voting population was more informed, as a percentage.
Agreed. Some fairly successful, peaceful, and reasonably just polities were formed in a time when only a small minority of the populace even had the right to vote. Expansion of the franchise, and increased participation by the uninformed and marginally politically literate has not charted linearly with improvement in government or society.
I’m all for a poll tax. Anything that ensures that those casting votes are actual stakeholders, not kibitzers.
I used to live in the United States. I’ve never had a green card. I have had visas, temporary ones, (F-1, J-1, TN). But those were more than enough to get a California driver’s license.
Which was my point. You can currently get a driver’s license in the U.S. without being eligible to vote. Making driver’s licenses for citizens only available to voters, while allowing non-citizens to get driver’s licenses, will mean that there are non-citizens who have an easier time getting driver’s licenses than citizens. Not all non-citizens, but some, and that’s enough to make it a very tough sell.
What does voting matter when the people in the election are all on the same side? 
… Participating in farcical “elections” is not necessarily the best way to show you care about issues, society, and our nation.
I’m all for voting, but it only seems to make sense when anyone, not just upper-class, corporate-sponsored talking heads, can viably run for office.
As mentioned above, it is compulsory to vote in Australia since WW1 and while there are occasional voices raised against it in newspaper columns, it isn’t really an issue that anyone cares much about to the extent of wanting to change it.
Some people just number the candidates in the order in which they appear on the ballot; this is known as the ‘donkey vote’, and at one time candidates whose names were high in the alphabet had a small advantage here, as the candidates were listed in alphabetical order. They are now listed in random order.