I’d turn that around. If the dialogue were more informed, people would be more informed. But because even ordinary people know that pre-election information is mostly worthless save for some obvious wedge issues, why waste much time and energy on it? Getting your message out, refining your personal brand, and managing a badass campaign organization have much higher returns than spreading information.
You are talking about returns for the politician, not returns for the electorate. A certain sibling of yours and I were just talking about how our political operative friend is on the opposite side of this issue, for reasons you just elucidated.
Regardless of who is doing the punishing, punishment is punishment.
And I understand that you’re trying to counter the “vote or die” contingent, but your approach isn’t geared to counter it very well. Along with the uninformed voters who decide to vote simply because they have that right, there are voters who decided to just now start exercising their right to vote even though they’ve been “well-informed” for years.
IOW, the “vote or die” approach causes some uninformed voters to cast their vote. Whereas your approach causes some well-informed voters to discard their vote.
LilShieste
Ok, let’s think about returns for the electorate. What does the electorate want? To be part of a critical group (the winning coalition) that backs the winning horse. Not just voting for the winner, mind you, but being part of a group that is pivotal.
The candidates know this. They want to convince their potential electors that they are all going to be part of their winning coalitions. Not being entirely stupid, the electorate knows that this is false. Not everyone can be in the cool kids’ club. If HRC’s winning coalition includes white suburban females aged 35-50, well, you and I ain’t going to be part of that coalition.
So each individual voter wants to be part of someone’s winning coalition because that is how he is going to get the payoff from the president. This is extremely private information. Observers can only guess what groups will compose a candidate’s winning coalition. If it were widely known, then other candidates could attempt to peel voters off to form their own winning coalitions.
So really, the voter has to take two bets. Which candidate includes you in his coalition? Is he going to win? If the answer to the first is zero, well, you might as well not vote because you are never getting a payoff. If the answer to the second is no, then you might as well vote for your next preferred alternative, because you won’t be backing the winner.
What is the point? Increasing “information”, which really is just noise dressed up as ideology or “nuanced” policy positions does not really inform the electorate at all. The only information that would actually interest the electorate is the very information that candidates absolutely cannot reveal, or they would surely lose. So like I said, you might as well just vote with your gut.
Uninformed people may be good judges of character, and in the end that might be more important then issues. Informed people may be lousy judges of character, and they may be easily swayed by the campaign platform of candidates who don’t have the best interests of the country at heart.
You’re premise is that there’s only one way to be a good voter, and I think that is a flawed idea.
Lots of uninformed voters believe they understand the issues perfectly. They won’t be persuaded to stay home.
Compared to most nations, we already have low turnout numbers. Driving the rate even lower can’t be a good move.
This would totally backfire. Consider an issue like AGW. An informed voter sees both sides, and also sees that the issue is far more complex than he has time for. He feels relatively uninformed. Your proposal would discourage him from voting. Compare him to some yahoo who knows that AGW is a crock since it snowed last week. He won’t be discouraged one little bit. You can make the same argument on the other side of the political spectrum, about globalization also, so this is not a left vs. right thing.
No matter how palatable you try to make it sound, the idea of discouraging voting smacks of poll taxes and literacy tests. If the U.S didn’t have such a rich history of disfranchising women and minorities, your idea might be a refreshing change of pace to the “Vote or Die” rhetoric; instead, though, it smells like the writings of a southern Reconstruction Era alarmist. 
- Honesty
Reverse psychology, anyone?
Turning voting into a morally obliged chore is likely to have the lazy and the uninterested going “Well, I should vote, but I was tired and it rained that night and the dog threw up and…”. Telling them you won’t have them voting, on the other hand, will have them up in arms and storming off to the ballot boxes in masses. “You can have my right to vote when you pry it from my cold dead hands…”.
Personally, I feel the main purpose of urging people to vote is to get them to stop whining about political decisions they don’t like. “Hey, I voted trying to keep that moron out of the White House. Did you?”.
I’m sorry that you are stuck in the past and cannot tell the difference between policy and pedestrian opinion, but that is something I cannot help. Perhaps you might consider not voting?
Well I think that part of such an initiative would be encouraging them to be informed. When we go out on Feb 2nd, we are going to be telling people “You have three more days to educate yourself.”
Yeah, but if they didn’t educate themselves on the issue then it’s mere randomness that caused them to be on one side or the other. If they vote then they get the satisfaction of acting with real intention.
Voting for the POTUS is a vicious fantasy for the self righteous. It is a pointless, hollow ritual. One may as well read the horoscope or take up tarot cards for all the good it’ll help your pathetic, pointless opinion transform itself into policy. So yes, discourage the non-informed from voting. And the informed.
Now, if you want to make an argument that you’re not wasting your time by voting locally I won’t stop you. It can be made. It doesn’t apply everywhere, but it makes a whole lot more sense.
Although I agree with you, this logic eats itself. The fewer people who vote, the more likely your vote will be pivotal, so the more people will want to end up wanting to vote. Oh well.
The more people understand the issues the more they know that their local vote is more important. I’ll probably include a statement about that in the literature I produce when I go out discouraging people.
As we’re already positing ill-defined, completely untenable solutions for a dubious problem, why not just move it back? If we simply discourage unqualified candidates from running for office in the first place, then there won’t be any bad choices for the unlettered masses to make.
Or better still, if we could just find a single candidate for each office who bears all the requisite qualities, we could dispense with the election process altogether.
Not ill-defined at all. It’s pretty clear what the intention is here. ‘Vote or Die’ tries to get people to the polls, this tries to get them not to go to the polls. What part of that do you not understand?
As always the strawman of this being anti-democracy rears it’s head from the critically disinclined. 
It’s not anti-democracy at all. Democracy is all about a dialogue between the people, this is just another part of that dialogue. No one is suggesting a change in policy in any way. We’re talking about a grass roots ad campaign to get people to voluntarily change their behavior.
If you find the proposal ill-defined I think that it reflects more upon your reading comprehension than anything else. Though, I don’t think I’ve started a thread in the last year that you haven’t chimed in with the obligatory assault on my ability with rhetoric. I like you though, cuz you’re cute and cuddly in your childlike zeal.
What part of ‘Go out and ask people not to vote.’ do you find so difficult to understand? Perhaps I can help you with it. You know, maybe I’ll print up bumper stickers, or create placards, get a guy in a sandwich board, use cross-media marketing, a Youtube campaign and everything. ;p
It’s not anti-democratic, it’s democracy in action!
Maeglin You’ve inadvertantly made an argument for this. If we convinced enough people not to vote, the votes of the people who do vote would be more valuable. Of course, I don’t expect that we’d have much impact discouraging people from voting, but if we were successful we’d be empowering the franchise of those who actually care about their democracy rather than those who are simply guilted into it by celebrities who want to get their name in lights by pretending to be politically engaged.
This does not really follow from my argument. The fewer people who vote, the greater likelihood that any individual’s vote is pivotal or that the winner will be included in the winning coalition depending on where the voter lives. This does not make the vote more valuable in any social sense. It actually does the reverse: the fewer people who vote, the smaller the winning coalition has to be. Therefore, candidates can win by representing successively narrower interests.
If you convince a million New Yorkers not to vote, it is probably not going to affect my franchise at all. It will just convince candidates that New Yorkers can be safely ignored, and I am not likely to be in anyone’s winning coalition. Thanks but no thanks.
Or possibly, every stupid uninformed voter cancels out the choice of another stupid uninformed voter, and the informed voters’ votes end up being the only ones that matter.
I don’t know how to discover whether my scenario, yours, or some other one, is the one that actually plays out in reality.
-Kris
Yep, lets go back to the good old days when White ,male ,landowners decided everything.
So who decides who is qualified? Do we give exams? We have an amendment preventing that because it was used to discriminate. Of course now it would not be used like that ,Would it. We could certainly trust this administration to be fair minded couldn’t we.?