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Comment by vagab0nd | Hacker News Reader

Yes. All surveys are biased towards people who are willing to take the survey.

In the most extreme case, if your survey only has one question, "are you willing to take this survey?" you would get 100% "yes".

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Would it be possible to remove that survey bias using coercion? For example, we could hire a gang to break into a supermarket and hold everyone there as hostages until they fill out a consumer preferences and brand visibility survey.

Yes, that's how they do the GDP survey.

Does someone preferring being shot result in a response?

The problem with this idea is that you're likely to get bad data: people forced into doing a survey aren't likely to want to answer honestly. Also remember, many surveys require you to think: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how often do you do X?" Answering this question honestly and accurately requires some thought. If you're forced to answer a barrage of questions like this before you're allowed to leave, the easiest and fastest thing to do is just mark the same number for all of them, or just a bunch of random numbers.

This is exactly why I think mandatory voting is stupid. Supporters claim it's better for democracy and forces people to choose leaders that represent them, but it doesn't: you can't force someone to care. You can't force someone to make an informed choice, instead of just randomly checking a box on a ballot.

We have statistical data from every Australian election (which has compulsory voting) on how many people donkey vote/protest vote, and it's not that many. If you're talking about people attempting to protest in subtly undetectable ways (i.e. not the easiest methods like leave blank, 12345, scribble, penis) by simply casting their vote in a random order that isn't a donkey vote, well if any substantial number of people were doing that then we should see a significant effect where irrelevant minor parties receive approximately equal numbers of votes to each other. In reality compulsory voting in Australia produces clear two-party dynamics, with third-party challengers and a reasonably dynamic system. There have been individual years where large numbers of smaller parties and independents were elected (relative to historical norms, not in absolute numbers), but these occurred at times of disillusionment with the major parties that would explain these effects, and this isn't a standard effect in Australian politics despite the voting system always being compulsory. Basically, real participation in voting is most likely in excess of 90% of the people who are formally registered as having voted, so your hypothesis that compulsory voting leads to an issue with voters not caring and just voting whatever isn't correct.

>In reality compulsory voting in Australia produces clear two-party dynamics, with third-party challengers and a reasonably dynamic system.

What makes you think the people who don't want to vote aren't just picking whichever name they've heard the most?

>Basically, real participation in voting is most likely in excess of 90% of the people who are formally registered as having voted

90% is not 100%, so it seems there's some people who still don't care. What makes you think you need compulsory voting to get people to care enough to cast a meaningful and honest vote, or that those 90% wouldn't care enough to vote even without it being compulsory?

>What makes you think the people who don't want to vote aren't just picking whichever name they've heard the most?

You're moving the goalposts, and frankly your new criteria isn't significantly different from an uncharitable description of various non-compulsory Western democracies.

>90% is not 100%, so it seems there's some people who still don't care. What makes you think you need compulsory voting to get people to care enough to cast a meaningful and honest vote, or that those 90% wouldn't care enough to vote even without it being compulsory?

Evidence? Go and look at voting participation rates and ballot spoiling data in compulsory vs non-compulsory voting countries.

>frankly your new criteria isn't significantly different from an uncharitable description of various non-compulsory Western democracies.

What makes you think those democracies actually choose good leaders? Honestly, I'm not aware of any countries that consistently pick good leaders; all systems for choosing leaders (democratic or otherwise) are bad, so debating them is just about debating which is less bad. Some are much worse than others.

>Go and look at voting participation rates and ballot spoiling data in compulsory vs non-compulsory voting countries.

You still haven't proven that voters in compulsory countries are actually being made to care and are conscientiously picking a candidate based on any real research. This isn't moving the goalposts; you simply haven't shown how the compulsory system actually produces better results. Australia isn't exactly known for picking great leadership. I'd say it does better than America, but that's an extremely low bar and easily explained by other factors.

>What makes you think those democracies actually choose good leaders? Honestly, I'm not aware of any countries that consistently pick good leaders; all systems for choosing leaders (democratic or otherwise) are bad, so debating them is just about debating which is less bad. Some are much worse than others.

I don't think that at all. Any bourgeois democracy has fundamental failings. I just disagree with your characterisation of compulsory voting as being stupid.

>You still haven't proven that voters in compulsory countries are actually being made to care and are conscientiously picking a candidate based on any real research.

You haven't proven that they're just ticking a box randomly like you originally said. There are other benefits of compulsory voting, as well, like it being significantly more difficult to suppress voters.

>There are other benefits of compulsory voting, as well, like it being significantly more difficult to suppress voters.

Yes, another responder here in this thread wrote a good post explaining how this works. It's the best argument I've seen yet for compulsory voting.

> you can't force someone to care.

Even worse: there do exist quite some people who do care a lot, and thus become very radicalized about the politicians and the political system.

The real value of mandatory voting has little to do with how people actually vote. Even if 95% of voters submitted blank ballots or wrote in "Mickey Mouse", I strongly suspect you'd get a better outcome than we see in countries with voluntary voting.

The main value of mandatory voting is that it makes it very hard for politicians to reason about which demographics they should cater to and which demographics they can ignore. Even if only 5% of voters vote honestly (the real number, of course, is vastly higher than that, as we see in Australia), politicians don't know who did and who didn't.

When only a portion of the population shows up to the booth, their demographic data is freely available. This means that politicians focus on the needs/desires of demographics that vote the most.

Also, voter suppression is not a thing in places with mandatory voting. Legislators don't bother writing laws to make voting harder for some demographics than others when everyone has to vote anyway.

Now these are some really good arguments in favor of mandatory voting.

More likely around 96%. Don't neglect the Lizardman Constant.

I just looked that up. Surely there's a non-zero percentage of people who do sincerely think David Icke's lizard people secretly control things.

I'm not claiming the insincerity constant is actually 0 but claiming it's 4% based on the assumption that those who must answer are being insincere, I think is incorrect.

Also have you taken those phone surveys? They go into "I really don't care" territory fast. "Now tell me, if you were going to buy toilet paper and there was a Walgreens, Rite-Aid, CVS, and Krogers, on a scale of 1 to 5, how often would you go into the Walgreens?"

Not if I force someone to unwillingly take your survey!

but then what if I force them to unwillingly punch you in the face and shout "NO!"?

I'm sure we can factor all this into the p-value somehow.

The claim in question is that they are genetically predisposed to, that that they’re simply predisposed to.

give it to enough people and there will likely be that one person who just wants to see the world burn...their answer will be something like "hotdog juice"

But what if they say no?

Looks good to me as long as the only answer in the survey is the "no"

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