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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
That's not a USA-specific problem; off the top of my head, I can't think of any countries where voting is an automatic holiday. It is an idea with some merit, though personally I'd stretch voting over several days and mandate that employers have to give time off for voting - so then employers would be able to plan around it.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
The general malaise in politics (I can't speak with first-hand experience with the USA, but Americans I talk to online are ridiculously downbeat wrt politics - and this is coming from an Englishman) won't be solved by compulsory voting. It would be a helpful step, but don't oversell it.
edited 12th Apr '13 6:51:24 AM by imadinosaur
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.I'd beg to differ. Look at the number of votes that were cast (for parties, not turnout) before Australia introduced compulsory voting and then compare that to the number after they introduced it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_1922
Election before and after they made voting mandatory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_1925
1,572,514 and 1,565,087 in 1922 compared to 2,916,638 and 2,805,002 in 1925,
edited 12th Apr '13 6:59:47 AM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranAbstention can be an option. Show up, sign your form, check in "none of the above".
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.![]()
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So there. We have data.
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It's an option. It's a stupid option, but I don't support taking it away as an option. But there's always a lesser evil. It's impossible to have two candidates so bad that you wouldn't rather have one of them win than let other people decide.
edited 12th Apr '13 7:04:22 AM by DrTentacles
Forced voting adds nothing to the political process beyond making people feel better by increasing the voter turnout percentages.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.It can be argued that by giving someone your vote, you are actively approving of them; so you cannot in good conscience vote for any abhorrent candidate, even if they are slightly less abhorrent than the other guy.
I'd be tempted to put in a law such that if the abstainers get the majority, a new election is called, with all of the existing candidates banned from participating. But I'm sure that such a law would never be passed in any country.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.Better a minor inconvenience than the risk of effectively disenfranchising people over apathy. Besides, it's good to clear up the ambiguity between "would have voted for X or Y but couldn't be bothered" and "actually thinks everyone including the third party options sucks".
On another note, I took a second look in the White House budget
and there's a lot of good stuff in there. If it weren't for the Chained CPI disgrace, the EPA cuts, and some of the farming cuts it'd be a fantastic budget (leave crop insurance alone or even expand them; they should be axing the subsidies to Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland). Though I'd rather they expanded Medicare/Medicaid to everyone rather than force wealthy seniors to pay more. Better than making poor seniors pay more, sure, but still.
Okay, discussion point: local politics. Now, local and state level politics have more freedom in what they're allowed to do in a lot of ways, and influence over important things like libraries, schools, transportation infrastructure, redevelopment projects, etc. They provide political experience for higher-level candidates. You also wield much more power as a voter in these elections. But these elections don't have big turnouts, I know I myself have a hard time becoming interested. Largely because I usually don't know much about the candidates positions, even if I've seen ads or newspaper articles. And people holding political signs or putting them in front of their houses or bumper stickers - don't say one whit what they're actually for. I could care less who supports a candidate, just tell me what you're in favor of.
Why? Why does name or party recogniton apparently trump anything else? Is it lack of money for campaigns, or that they can pretend to be everything to everyone if their position isn't written down in visible places? And do you think this is a real issue or am I imagining it?
She of Short Stature & Impeccable Logic My Skating LiveblogThat's meaningless.
I'm sorry I didn't realize freedom was meaningless.
YES, IT IS!
It's been that way since creation of this nation! People are given the right to vote!
Who cares if it's 50% or 90% of the population that votes? And look at the Australian Politics Thread
,the bulk majority of it is complaining about the state of Australian Politics. So can anyone honestly say there citizens are making more informed choices because they have mandatory voting?
Rep. Steve Stockman: ‘If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted’
Oh god, my f*cking brain.
edited 12th Apr '13 12:44:22 PM by DeviantBraeburn
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016Aren't the majority of most our national politics threads made up of moaning about the state of that countries politics?
edited 12th Apr '13 11:08:31 AM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranDid someone bring up the time last July when the Pentagon was planning to spend $40 million on fiber optic cables from Guantanamo Bay to the US mainlands, thus indicating that Guantanamo is not going to be shut down for a while? (for reference: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9380384/Pentagon-plans-40m-fiber-optic-cable-from-Guantanamo-Bay-to-US-mainland.html
)
Whatever happened to that plan? Did it go through? Are there currently cables connecting the Bay and the mainlands now? Because if it did go through, I ask: why do that?
edited 12th Apr '13 11:18:48 AM by Nettacki
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It's a pretty low-key complaint thread, too. Of course, one could chalk that up to the site not having a lot of Aussie traffic.
It may not be directly related, but what I do notice from browsing Australia's election statistics is that they have significantly more support for third parties. Their stats for voting third party seem to be consistently in the 15 to 20 percent range, whereas the USA's is more like 1 percent. If you consider lack of third party support to be a problem, then mandatory voting might be one of various ways to help alleviate it.
edited 12th Apr '13 11:20:48 AM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.![]()
When people talk about "Guantanamo", they generally mean the Guantanamo Bay detention camp
, which was set up by the Bush administration in 2002 to hold suspected terrorists outside the USA. So someone saying "I want Guantanamo shut down" is usually referring to this prison.
However, the main US installation in Cuba is Guantanamo Bay Naval Base
, a 45-square mile port. The detention camp is a subset of this much larger base, which has operated since the end of the Spanish American War in 1898. Could the fibre optic cables have been to connect the main naval base and not the detention camp?
edited 12th Apr '13 11:23:13 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der Partei

edited 12th Apr '13 6:46:57 AM by Wildcard