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Comment by daniel_levine | Hacker News Reader

Huge fan of this! Increasing voter turnout is something I think everyone can get behind and has a tremendous impact!

I thought that increased voter turnout (at least in the USA) tends to benefit one party disproportionately more than the other, and is therefore a partisan issue. This is why efforts to disqualify voters tend to be supported by one party and opposed by the other, and vice versa for efforts to open up voting to more people.

It may benefit one party more than the other, but... is that really an argument for not increasing the turnout? It sounds crazy to me that anyone can argue against it in a system whose legitimacy comes from regular expressions of the popular will.

Popular will can be a dangerous thing if the popular will is dominated by ignorance. I personally don't want everyone to vote. Kayne West would end up president.

You're right, but... what's the alternative? Fear of "mob rule" is what kept the nobility afraid of a transition to representative government.

I want the populace's will represented (constrained by constitutional protections of various rights), but I'll admit sometimes you just wish you had another populace. That's just the cards you're dealt. Other forms of government aren't responsive to the people.

This comic was an amusing commentary on this topic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sword-of-democracy

You don't really want the populace's will represented, though. You want decisions to be made in the manner that best conforms to the populations needs. The difference being that the former tends to reflect what people currently know and feel while the latter reflects what they would do if they had more information and behaved rationally.

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