Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone should vote. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but democracy only works with informed citizens. If you have a bunch of people that are not informed on the issue voting you're probably going to have an outcome that is awful. If you think politicians are bad now, just wait until the populists have the uninformed voting in high numbers (hey, that sounds familiar this year.)

To me, if you don't care enough to take time to vote as it is, you probably don't know the issues, and you probably shouldn't vote. Or maybe you do know the issues, and that's why you're not voting.

There are some cases where this is not true, such as someone having a weird shift; but that's what early voting is for, and that's why most states have legal paid time off for voting (up to 3 hours.) There's also mail-in ballots, absentee voting, etc. Democracy isn't always a good thing, to be frank; and it's undoubtedly why the U.S. was set up as a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy.

> To me, if you don't care enough to take time to vote as it is, you probably don't know the issues, and you probably shouldn't vote.

Or maybe you live in a state where your vote doesn't matter because it's not a swing state.

Or maybe neither two-party candidate is on the right side of the issues you care most about.

Don't want to go to war? Do you pick Hillary or Trump? Who knows? Want to see Criminal Justice reform? Which candidate do you pick: The one that backed mandatory minimums helping shift the scales to the prosecution and making judges largely irrelevant for a majority of cases or the "not liberal" one? Want to see domestic spying scaled back and transparency introduced? Which candidate?

Oh, I agree with all of that. I amended my post to mention that too. Usually I've vote for a 3rd party though, but I agree that choosing to not vote is just as legitimate as voting. I don't agree with the sentiment of "you can't complain if you didn't vote." That's total nonsense.

One doesn't need to be "well informed" about politics to express a perfectly valid preference based on one issue that is important to them (indeed, democracy works much better if people who aren't very informed about politics in general turn up to vote en masse against a politician that proposes something that will harm their relatively uninformed demographic[1])

The real reason not everyone should vote is that it's not a good thing for people don't feel strongly enough about something to vote to deprive those that do of relative political influence.

[1]a corollary of this is that variable turnout is probably a good thing (easier to discriminate against a demographic if you know that 100% will vote for the other guy regardless of how they act)

The voting constituency is not, nor has it ever been, made up of informed citizens. Indeed, you could probably say that the more extreme your political views are, the more likely you are to vote. In this case, more 'average' voters would result in a moderation of discourse and alleviate the hyper-partisan gridlock that currently defines the American system.

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