What If Everyone Voted (in the UK) | Hacker News Reader

What If Everyone Voted (in the UK)

proseandcode.co.uk

For the group, it's good (for some definition of good) if everyone votes. For the individual, their payoff from voting is extremely likely to be zero: if you voted, and your chosen MP won by a single vote, your trip to the polling station made a difference. Any other outcome, and you could have stayed at home or gone to the pub instead, with no change in outcome.

Whilst I'm not generally in favour of the state forcing people to do things, I wouldn't mind if I (and everyone else) were forced to vote at every general election, with some potential penalty to incentivise compliance.

Voting is mandatory in Australia and our political system doesn't seem particularly better (or worse) then the UK.

Genuine question, how do you police that?

You get your name and address checked off when you vote, if you don't get checked off you get fined (~$100). However I've heard of people sometimes not voting without getting fined, not sure why.

I'm generally not in favour of mandatory voting either but I do think one way of moving forward with Brexit would be to demand a vote from those who didn't turn out for the referendum. When the direction of a nation has been decided by less than a majority (in this case, by 34% of the electorate?) I think special measures can be justified.

It shouldn't be hard to identify those voters; I always have to hand my voting card to someone when I go to a polling station so I imagine there are lots of lists somewhere of people who were registered but didn't turn up.

The problem with that is that it isn't fair to those who did vote, because the ones voting now have more information to go on.

The only fair way to do this would be a second referendum with mandatory voting.

Which won't be popular, unfortunately.

The direction of the nation is decided by less than a majority in every vote. So why would this one in particular require "special measures"?

I think what you're getting at here is you support the EU, so would prefer if attempts to leave it or defy it were harder to implement than normal decisions.

Even if remain won, I would still like to see at least 2/3 majority requirement for such an important vote. I don't mind simple majority for periodically repeating votes(parliamentary elections) but decisions which are almost irreversible or which have deep and long-lasting consequences(leaving/joining EU, going to war, breaking up the United Kingdom, changing constitution) should have a 2/3 majority requirement.

And how about if the vote had been phrased as "do you wish to remain in the EU", with a 2/3rd requirement to meet the bar, meaning 1/3rd was sufficient to trigger Brexit? Would that have seemed fair?

Democracy evolved as a shortcut to avoid fights. Just count and you got a rough idea of which side has the most people and thus, is more likely to win if it came down to it. Once you start tipping the threshold in order to bias things towards your preferred decisions, you increase the risk of the losing side thinking ... wait a minute. We could win this. That's far worse than any other outcome.

The EU and its supporters constantly warp the system to try and make it hard for people to leave, hard for the people to reject their policies. It is fundamentally undemocratic.

Well, if you look at all the things I mentioned in my post, they have one thing in common - they are votes to change something, not to keep it the same. To continue with my example, why should the vote be "do you want to go to war" and not "do you want to not go to war"? Because the current state is not being at war, so I'd argue you need an overwhelming support to actually go to war, since it's not a lightweight decision.

>>The EU and its supporters constantly warp the system to try and make it hard for people to leave, hard for the people to reject their policies. It is fundamentally undemocratic.

Well......I guess it's because I want to see a federal europe with all nations united into one, so of course I don't want people to leave the union. But as we are seeing now, they can. What's more, I truly believe that every EU country can reject any policy they want, what are the consequences of doing that, really? Look at Poland, Hungary - their governments are powering ahead with populist nationalist policies which are firmly against EU laws and policies, and what does EU do? They send a strongly worded warning, saying there may be sanctions. I don't think the Polish government cares - they will serve their entire term without any repercussions other than making a lot of enemies in neighbouring countries.

As for fundamentally undemocratic.....is there any country in the world which is "fundamentally democratic"? Literally no country has democracy as it was first implemented in Greece, and in most countries around the world most votes != win, just like Trump won despite not receiving the majority of votes, just like in UK the party that receives majority of votes means nothing since all that counts is seats.......we implement "democracy" in various forms all the time. So why would seat-based parliament be a democracy, but 2/3 majority requirement not?

My level of support for the EU is neither here or there but I do get really irate when my country's PM presumes to act according to "the will of the people". We simply don't really know whether that's true or not and I think it'd be nice to find out (somehow).

Mandatory voting just results in on-average less informed voters, doesn't it? If someone can't be bothered to go to the polls, what makes you think they'll be bothered to inform themselves of the issues and candidates?

The way to prevent a small minority from deciding stuff like brexit is by having a minimum of attendance required - if not met, the results are void.

Yes. Or they could have said that a certain number of votes would be required (equal to 50% of the electorate). So, even if only 51% turned out, the result would stand if 98% of them voted to leave.

Most people would call that rigging the election.

> Mandatory voting just results in on-average less informed voters, doesn't it? If someone can't be bothered to go to the polls, what makes you think they'll be bothered to inform themselves of the issues and candidates?

Apathy can be driven from a feeling of helplessness as well as simply not really caring or knowing what's happening.

Additionally, if people had to vote, would they try and engage more?

I guess the key question would be, would the ill-informed that don't vote cause enough of an issue to outweigh the benefits of having higher participation from those who feel simply more left out?

I would love to see other propositions as well, currently a candidate/party has two main actions that are beneficial for them:

1. Make more people vote for them 2. Make fewer people vote for the other side

So weirdly our politicians are rewarded for lowering participation in groups that don't vote their way.

What if we could link the control with the total turnout? Perhaps at least with some things, like to force a bill past the Lords requires enough MPs to represent more than X% of the country itself. Maybe this would be a terrible idea, but I'd love to know what other alternatives we could consider.

"If someone can't be bothered to go to the polls, what makes you think they'll be bothered to inform themselves of the issues and candidates?"

My explanation for why someone might rationally decide not to vote did not reference or depend upon the extent to which the person was informed or how much they would exert effort to be better informed. Some of the people who don't vote now are well-informed. They don't vote because their individual vote won't change the outcome. You want more of those folks to vote.

There are other people (who you're talking about) who aren't well-informed, but would be forced to vote in any case.

Your assertion "Mandatory voting just results in on-average less informed voters" would be true if the two groups I mentioned were, on average, less well informed than the people who normally vote.

That might be true, and it might not be true. Do you have strong evidence either way? Or just a hunch that if someone bothers to vote they are more likely to be well-informed?

Actually what we need is an electoral system in which everyone can feel like their vote was counted.

Agreed. I found voting in the brexit referendum a strangely exhilarating experience, as living in a safe constituency it felt like it was the first time in my life that my vote was making any meaningful contribution to the national result.

This is for Britain, not the United Kingdom.

Ish, the map is for Britain (at least most of it), but the figures are for the UK as a whole as it covers all the 650 seats. I didn't have a good map I could swap in to cover NI as well.

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