I would not absolutely count on “no repercussions”. It is, yes, legal for you to go through that intersection on the green light, but if someone is making a left across your lane of travel and you make no effort to avoid them, there could be repercussions for acting legally. If you kill Joe, Joe’s spouse could sue you for visiting undue hardship upon the three children, who no longer have a father or breadwinner. The law does not always insulate you from the side-effects of legal behavior.
In this hypothetical there is a difference between thinking the law itself is a bad idea and thinking that voting for the law is a bad idea. I can certainly see why a person might think the proposed law is evil and heinous yet at the same time voting “yes” for it because, given the utterly nasty situation, they consider that their “best” move.
There are similarities to the presidential election in 2000. One might have felt that Ralph Nader was the best candidate for the office yet still voted for Gore because they thought that was their “best” move.
Yes. As I noted earlier, if this vote passes it would mean civil war. No way the deaths would be limited to no-voters.
You could treat someone who did not vote as a Yes or as a No without his/her abstention counting as a vote: only valid cast ballots count to determine the majority but the abstentionists would be treated either as Yessers or Noers with all consequences the majority vote carries.
I voted No, BTW. I am already very tempted to go out on a rampage and kill all the bastards, but the bastards probably would vote Yes, so the only ones left to legally kill would be those I don’t want to kill. But you set up a nice *Gedankenexperiment *there, I must admit. Clever.
This seems inconsistent with the premise. Why did you not make it public, as the referendum is supposed to be?
Yes, I think the pre-election polls would become pretty important. If it’s obvious the law will fail, it’s very easy to vote no. The closer it gets to passing, the harder it gets to take the principled stand against murder.
But then you have to figure, if the final vote is close, then almost half the population will now be vulnerable. There might be an uneasy peace for a little while, because as has been mentioned, most people aren’t itching to go out and kill. But I’d have to think that, with a legally sanctioned caste system that privileges half the people so grossly at the expense of the other half, there’s going to be trouble. Likely a civil war. Then it would be a question of what side you’re more comfortable standing with in battle: the privileged oppressors or the downtrodden minority. It would be less a question of your own safety, because you wouldn’t really be safe either way.
Maybe there’s a point where, if it looks like the yesses will win by a large margin, you can ethically vote yes with the aim of using your retained privilege to help protect the newly vulnerable underclass. It would have to be at a point where you can’t plausibly believe the nos could mount any effective resistance themselves, as they’d be such a small percentage of the population.
And this is the heart of the matter: We don’t trust each other to do the right thing. Is that depressing to anyone else? Do you suppose it was different at any other time in this country’s history? Was there a time when it would have been assumed that any sane person would vote against such a bad law, and that since most people were sane, there was no chance of it passing? Suppose I had posted this hypothetical in 1950?
Also:
Is it the large number that bothers you? Suppose the number were smaller?
I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with the theoretical Dunbar’s number.
Imagine instead that the vote comes up in the village you were born in, population 150. You know these people. You don’t trust every single one of them completely, but you don’t believe half of them are secret monsters, and besides they’ve all lived together in a functioning community for as long as you’ve been alive. Would that make you more likely to vote no?
That says more clearly there’s an assumed real world country and it’s the US. Which I can see from the POV of commentary on US real world society. But OTOH the idea of a direct democracy referendum dealing with basic rights is more far fetched in the US than most other places. Not that a ‘death referendum’ is likely anywhere, obviously. But the US system, not only laws and the Constitution, but general beliefs of the electorate to a significant degree also, is relatively less friendly to absolute democracy than most places. That’s not always good, or bad, depends on the real world issue and one’s POV. But I think it’s worth noting now that you more clearly say this is supposed to be a commentary on US social cohesion.
Which was surely greater in 1950 than now. But which again isn’t strictly speaking a good or bad thing. The consensus of 1950 included some ideas, implicit or explicit, of who ‘we’ were as Americans that almost everyone would reject now Although in other cases the US social divide we’re speaking of now could actually be described somewhat in terms or who is relatively more or less comprehensively hostile to the American self-image of 1950.
I’d just add on a minor point that even without ‘massive disinformation campaign’ (and besides the fact US left and right now think each other’s main mouthpieces are always waging ‘disinformation campaigns’ 
) people rarely freely vote literally 100% against anything. I guess the closest historical case in the US would be zero individual popular votes recorded in for Lincoln in some Southern states in the 1860 election. But some people would virtually certainly vote against the ‘death referendum’ no matter what you specify for information campaigns either way so, so even within the far fetched hypothetical, if it has any relation to actual human nature, the case where everyone votes yes, so it’s harmless, would not exist.
Unless you mean you’re going to physically interpose yourself between no voters and everyone else, using yourself as a human shield, I’m not sure how your ‘retained privilege’ is going to enable you to protect anybody. Especially since you’re going to be hard-pressed to identify who you’re supposed to protect from whom - unless your vote is tattooed on your forehead you’d have to go fetch a list and laboriously identify people on it one by one. Which is fine if you’re just a murderous sociopath who doesn’t care who you kill as long as they die, but which isn’t as fine if you’re trying to identify potential killers and victims. Especially since the first thing you’d learn was that you’re a potential killer - the ‘no’ person probably wouldn’t want you hanging around on the pretext of protecting them.
Reading through this thread has convinced me that there’s no ethical way to vote ‘yes’. At best you vote ‘yes’ because you want to murder random people for fun. Worse than that is if you don’t care if your selfish choice causes scores of other people die. The direct murderer is responsible only for his own kills; persons covering their own butts are responsible for all the murders they facilitate.
I disagree that I’m responsible for the actions of others, no matter how legal I vote to make that action.
Then no Nazi who supported Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust - or any Trump voter responsible for anything Trump or the GOP does.
Joining the Nazi party was an action that an individual took, making them responsible.
Obama voters are not responsible for all the people killed in drone strikes during his administration.
If the Democratic Party had “Drone bomb poor, brown people in the Middle East” as a core tenet, then yes, a person joining the Democratic Party would be responsible.
Ah…what? This is the Referendum of Death, as outlined by the OP. Giving one group of people the legal right to murder another group ***is ***the very central core tenet of the referendum. :dubious:
True, but I personally see a difference between “allowing” someone to do something and “condoning” it.
If there were a National referendum on abortion, I would vote to “allow” it, but I don’t condone abortion. If I voted to allow abortion, I’m not responsible for all the abortions that occur.
If the poll in this topic was “Yes voters MUST kill a No voter”, then I would vote “No”.
I would promptly pack my bags and LEAVE this so-called democratic state where everyone’s vote is public knowledge.
It had been proven repeatedly that the only democratic vote is a secret vote. The moment you know your vote will be public, you are not voting your opinion but your fears.
You might as well have phrased the question as:
Do you vote that traitors to the Nation should be shot without trial?
… Names of “yes” voters will be posted on the “wall of death” notice board.
This would amount to starting a civil war between the yes and no voters, which is why really important questions like presidential elections should not be decided 50.01% to 49.99%. The supermajority required to amend the US Constitution is a prime example: the 2/3 - 3/4 majority required is roughly what it takes to win a civil war if the losing side rebelled.
The poll is “SOME yes voters WILL kill a no voter.” This vote was instigated by some people and they were vocal enough to convince the cowardly populace that there was a chance they’d win.
Honestly, this whole vote really comes down to two questions: 1) should murder be illegal at all? and 2) are you willing to murder countless others to save your own skin?
The argument you’re making analogizing this to abortion is the first argument - you’re arguing that murder should be legal. Straight up legal, murder anybody you want, kill them all, it’s not your problem because you’re not the one that made them do it. That’s the argument you’re making when you try to dismiss your responsibility for their actions; you actually are responsible for your vote, and for the consequences of your vote, whether you dislike admitting that or not. If you vote to legalize abortion, you’re responsible for the part you played in allowing women the freedom to get abortions. If you vote to legalize murder, you’re responsible for the part you played in allowing people to commit murder.
Which means that, as you can probably anticipate, nobody’s going to be impressed by your “I didn’t shoot you, I merely loaded the gun and handed it to the person who was announcing that he would shoot you if he had a loaded gun” argument.
All that said, if you’re really pro-slaughter of innocents, that’s at least an ethos. But most people throwing their support behind this are more in the “I’m willing to slaughter millions of people just to save my own skin” camp.
No, I don’t agree that is the poll.
I don’t care if anybody is impressed. Like I said, I’m responsible for my actions and the actions of my children. I’m not a fan of the “He told me to do it!” defense.
Do you feel you are responsible for each and every person that the US killed during the Obama Administration (assuming you voted for Obama)?
If you let someone borrow your car, and they get drunk and crash into a van of nuns and kittens, are you responsible for those deaths? Since you put the keys into the hands of the guy that killed them?
If you want to take responsibility for what other people do, then more power to you. I’m not doing that.
If he was drunk when you gave him the keys, OR he was loudly stating that he was off to get drunk as soon as you gave them to him (And that’s the analogy here.), then yes, of course you are.
Not as responsible as the drunk driver, but you’re still responsible.