Voting should be the single required act to trigger your Universal Basic Income for the year.
Now, if only the government did anything to the benefit of younger people (or really anything at all, seriously, look at what has been passed in this session) perhaps young people could be bothered to leave work (which will in a lot of cases cause illegal employer push back) and vote.
If you're going to make an argument about widespread illegal activity, please provide some evidence of that. While there are isolated cases of this happening, there is scant evidence that this is widespread ('a lot of cases').
Remember that, in most states, it's not that you're allowed to take leave whenever you want in order to vote. It's that employers must ensure that you have sufficient time during polling hours to vote (ie, if your shift starts at 9AM, and polls open at 6AM, they have satisfied this requirement). If you do not have sufficient time outside working hours to vote, employers may not punish you for taking time to vote. (Note that this time may be paid or unpaid leave, depending on the state and nature of employment).
The reason young people don't vote is not because of insufficient time off. (If it were, youth voting rates in states like Oregon and Washington, which allow by-mail voting, would be dramatically higher than they currently are. As it is, they're higher than other states, but demographically-adjusted nowhere near what you would expect if insufficient time off were the primary driver of low youth turnout).
It is entirely your own fault if you don't spend time educating yourself on the issues and don't vote for a candidate who is congruent with your beliefs. If you don't find a candidate to your liking, run yourself.
Much harder than posting pics to Instagram or swiping left or right, but them the breaks of democracy.
"none of the above" is a valid choice, and it would help politicians get a better picture for what the general population wants (instead of the current situation of "compared to X i want Y")
So I can vote {Nobody, Indifference, Zero, X, Y} if I think the office itself should be abolished. I can vote {Nobody, Zero, Indifference, X, Y} to say the office is stupid and that both the candidates for it suck. I can vote {Zero, Nobody, Indifference, X, Y} if I just don't like this crop of candidates. I can vote {Zero, X, Y, Nobody, Indifference} if I think X is the lesser of two evils, but either would be better than nothing. I can vote {X, Zero, Nobody, Y, Indifference} if I think X would be fine, but Y a bigger disaster than leaving the office empty. I can vote {Indifference, Nobody, X, Y, Zero} to say I don't care about this race at all.
If the default vote configuration starts at the "don't care" ordering, voters can drag the other entries up above the indifference line to indicate what they really care about.
...and then the politicians can more easily discern the will of the people that they can subsequently ignore completely, as usual.~
I'm not sure how I feel about the "Nobody"/"Zero" votes though. I can see where you are coming from, and they could have some use, but I think that would be the part that would throw some people over the edge of being confused by the system.
A simple "rank your candidates from best to worst, you can stop whenever you want" system is simple enough that everyone can get it, and solves a ton of problems with the current single-vote system we have now. Plus by putting nobody on the ballot (but still submitting it) you show "nobody" implicitly. (and you could even make it an explicit checkbox if you want)
We tend to have a lot of Independents and Greens run here (one of our current Senators is an Independent) and be successful. I'm really interested to see how it turns out.
abstinence from a vote is a form of social protest.
Voter turnout is fairly decent sign of voter confidence in the power of their vote to make a lasting change.
If you establish a form of mandatory voting, the state loses the feedback loop of 'non-voters' to establish voter confidence and also exerts another pressure on the citizenry; further hurting the citizens' feeling of self-control.
Basically, 'None' option or not, you're just taking another choice away from the voter.
Many tend not to remember this, but there are plenty of registered voters who don't show up or ever vote. This isn't necessarily a failure of voting advocates to get them in the booths, it may very well be an intentional protest on the part of the voter.
There's no law against leaving an entry blank.... until one is introduced and you don't care enough to vote against it.
It does. Even with places with mandatory voting, you usually are only required to turn in a ballot paper, it can still not actually vote for any of the options.
Of course, that's just ceding your involvement in the choice (as it should be -- you are, in effect, voting no preference between the available options.)
Usual election systems already support the case where you find the options unequally unacceptable.
-vs-
"I find any method of death equal unacceptable."
______
Yes, it's true everyone dies, but we're not talking about death and it's obvious that it's possible to have a voting system that's able to tell the difference between indifference, objection, and support of the potential candidates/parties in a general election.
With most voting systems if a single person votes, it's a valid election. If the majority decent, it's still a valid election.
It should be that if the majority decent, the election is nullified - otherwise it's a recipe for a toxic political environment.
"differently unacceptable" is also a terrible situation though! this is the entire point of my argument. I may find some candidates more bad than others. being forced to vote for less bad is still being disenfranchised to a significant extent.
FPTP is a bad system of aggregating preferences where there are more than two options in principle, and produces bad effects in the filtering (and voting) process because people adjust for the bad way that it aggregates preferences. And there are lots of sensible, obvious, and proven ways to make that better. But none of them guarantee you a situation where you aren't forced either to not vote it to vote for a less-bad alternative (though ranked ballots methods move some of the filtering process into the general election, down-ballot votes are still votes.)
the state we find ourselves in this year is abundant evidence of the terrible malfunctioning of the American political process. the system we have in place now struggles to reach even the basic requirements of legitimacy and consent of the governed.
what does popular sovereignty mean anyway if large majorities of the populous are very very very unhappy with their government?
You (or your MP or other legislative representative) can usually do some or all of these things in most systems that are recognized as democracies.
What you seem to want is something different, the option to vote for No Representative in a regular election and cause the office to be vacant when the next term would start (whether this actually leaves the office vacant or triggers the usual succession mechanism that would apply if it had been filled and then became vacant through death, resignation, etc. is unclear.) This, I can't see a coherent argument for.
I think the term is appropriate here as well but might be problematic because of its historical usage. Avoiding confusion or conflation is a good thing, so maybe a different term should be used for this situation.
I think your suggestion of No Representation is a decent one. I'm not suggesting that that should result in an unfilled office though. My view is that if No Representation actually wins (takes the plurality of the vote), it should trigger a special election where new candidates must be nominated and a new popular vote must be held.
I don't think anything else is even remotely reasonable, in the end.
> My view is that if No Representation actually wins (takes the plurality of the vote), it should trigger a special election where new candidates must be nominated and a new popular vote must be held.
A special election is a not-uncommon vacancy-filling mechanism, but I think you are still going to have to accept vacancies caused by a No Representative win if you want the option at all: by design, elections are usually proximate in time to the end of the term -- the two month time between US federal general elections and the start of Congressional terms is about the length usually specified for a special election, leaving no time to actually tabulate and certify election results before the next term would start, and even if you can squeeze in one special election between the regular election and the start of the term, what happens if you get a No Representative win in the second election? Or does the supposed "democratic right" to vote against all candidates only apply once per cycle (and if it does, why do you think you'll get more acceptable candidates in the second try)?
in these parliamentary systems its a way to avoid total deadlock where the executive and legislature cannot come to terms. this is obviously a problem we suffer from acutely in the U.S. right now. however, that's a somewhat different scenario than what we're discussing here specifically, where the no confidence vote would come directly from the popular vote instead of as a parliamentary procedure.
In the context of a popular general election, this would be similar to failure to form a quorum, meaning no participant in the election can be considered to have a mandate or consent of the governed.
what would it mean for this outcome to "win" the election? Clearly that the procedures that nominated candidates for office had malfunctioned and that none of the nominated candidates are satisfactory to a sufficient slice of the electorate. This would be a protection against a form of oligarchy or minority rule. I think the reasons for considering this are abundantly clear in the U.S. in 2016.
what should happen as a result of a general no confidence result? my suggestion would be a special election where the candidates of the previous election are barred from being re-nominated. if the special election also failed to select a candidate with a mandate to govern then it should automatically trigger a constitutional convention, since that would represent a PROFOUND failure to represent the people and would need to be resolved by extraordinary means.
Also, places like Australia that have compulsory voting do not check that you have marked the ballot in any fashion, only signed in, taken a ballot, and put it in the box.