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Comment by lugg | Hacker News Reader

Does that not just make it harder for informed opinions sway outcomes?

Or on the flip side does it actually make it harder to use a small subset of the population to steal an election from an apathetic population at large.

I.e. you'd still be able to take advantage of the apathy but it'd be a much slower moving change towards extremes and polarisation which is pretty good for democracy in general.

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It's sort of like a random forest algorithm and how it resists overfitting - lots of partially informed votes by people who lack 'single focus' issues driving their vote make it hard for the system to be swayed to extremes. It's mostly good but it definitely results in many issues (like freedom of expression) falling down due to apathy of the masses. For example there was just an election and the opposition leader had promised on passing controversial spying legislation last year that they did so only on a proviso it would be immediately revisited. He completely failed to do that, but having been proven a liar did not even get raised during the election. Literally nobody except vulnerable minorities care, and they don't count in Australian elections.

“Informed” and “motivated to vote” don’t correlate well. I’d even argue that they might be negatively correlated; the people most fanatical about voting are the same people who get their news from extremely biased and inaccurate sources. Mandatory voting takes power away from the crazies.

The pros and cons of mandatory voting : https://vittana.org/10-mandatory-voting-pros-and-cons

After reading that I think maybe a reward system would work better than a penalty?

Might encourage people w/ jobs who can't get to the polls to go and vote, but doesn't put unnecessary drain on their life.

They also should make voting day a national holiday, and give a tax deduction to companies who allow their employees to take as much time as they need to vote (given some lines can be hours long in places).

Edit: My comment is directed to the U.S.A. as that's where I'm from.

We currently have "I Voted" stickers.

Free ice cream with each vote?

I'd vote a few times for that!

maybe like $50, and $10 extra for each election in a row--like if you don't miss one else you start over at $50, including local elections. They could have a mobile app and have badges too, and 10'th election you get a free sub.

they have a 'democracy sausage' - i think it also may be compulsory to eat one.

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