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Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

I have long suspected this to be true. That's my argument against mandatory voting, because if people can choose not to vote, they can express they don't know and hopefully leave the result on people who feel they do know.

However, it's a bit unclear how this ties together with Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy). The D-K effect would suggest that if you allow people to express doubt, the experts will doubt more, and overall performance will decrease.

It would be interesting if someone did a psychology experiment on that. (I am actually in favor of doing these kinds of demonstrations in high school, because it's in my opinion important for people to understand how democratic voting works, for example the fact that voting won't get you a simple average of the results - which is usually used as an argument against democracy.)

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> Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy)

Democracy isn't about having an efficient system, it's about having a stable system. Democracy is an awful way of getting things done, it's just a reasonably good way of stopping very bad things from happening.

Favorite quotation from Kelly Johnson, former head of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works:

> Voting on everything prevents anything very stupid from happening, but also anything very brilliant.

You can guess who called the shots in his aircraft design teams. He did, because he was truly fucking brilliant.

Yes, exactly. It's inefficient, that's the point of it.

He didn't have the same control over things as a dictator would. You can do these things in business more safely because it's less likely to kill large numbers of people.

Yeah, that's the value of a "benevolent dictator" in business. Skunk Works had one, Apple, Python, Ubuntu, and SpaceX too, and all blazed incredible trails in their fields.

I wish more people understood this. People alwayss complain about gridlock, but gridlock is great. It might block progress sometimes but it blocks regresssion just as often. It ensures that changes tend to have wide popular support.

That's not how mandatory voting works, at least in Australia, one if the few democracies to have it. It's mandatory to show up to the voting place and get your name ticked off the roll. It is not mandatory to actually cast a vote. You can turn around and walk back out as soon as your name has been crossed off. Or you can cast a blank ballot. Or an invalid ballot, or a donkey vote etc etc

> I have long suspected this to be true. That's my argument against mandatory voting, because if people can choose not to vote, they can express they don't know and hopefully leave the result on people who feel they do know.

Mandatory voting can include "I don't know" (and, in fact, it naturally falls out in a simple way from any use of preference ballots with a tallying system that accounts for ties and treats all unranked candidates as tied for the position immediately below all explicitly-ranked candidates.)

EDIT: Further, such a system would naturally handle the more common case where people do have known preferences, but they aren't accurately represented either as a forced preference ranking of all candidates (as with preference ballots that reject ties), or a unique most-preferred status for one candidate (as is the case with the "bullet" ballots typically used in FPTP elections.)

I'd actually be pretty surprised if the Dunning-Kruger effect applied significantly to politics. There are so many tribal pressures involved that I think that the phenomena involved with Dunning-Kruger would be overwhelmed.

In representative democracy, probably yes. But D-K effect is commonly used as an argument against (semi)direct democracy.

You can have mandatory voting with a "none of the above" option on the ballot.

And the point of such a system is? To spend more money and time of everyone?

When "none of the above" wins, it usually means new elections where all old candidates are banned or some other procedure to resolve complete distrust to current politicians.

But then the original point stands. Such a system doesn't fully allow you to express legitimate feeling that you don't know. If majority expresses "I don't know", it doesn't suddenly mean "I don't trust old guard" vote. That's misinterpretation of the voting result.

Also, you can express "I don't trust old guard" in the non-mandatory voting system as well. Just vote for the new candidate. So it's actually simpler system than yours and more expressive.

In Australia, citizens have a duty to pay taxes, defend their country (if required to do so), serve on a jury (if their name is drawn), and vote. That's the cost of living in a democracy.

If voting was compulsory, only lunatics would vote. I wouldn't voluntarily pay taxes, sign up to fight a war, or serve on a jury either - I'm not crazy; but I think it's important that these things get done.

Hm, thinking about it, maybe I was wrong. Maybe you can actually express "I don't care" vote in the mandatory voting system as well, by voting for a randomly selected candidate (and these contribution will average out to same votes for all candidates). But it's rather impractical compared to simple non-mandatory voting.

What about the difference between "I want X, but there's no way they're getting in, so I won't bother" and "I don't want any of them"?

That's a technical issue. There are voting systems with points, and you can vote against someone rather than just for them. And you can vote for many people. I've said it once and I'll say it again, FPTP is a tyrant's idea of democracy.

One argument is to stop efforts to disfranchise voters. If voting is mandatory things like photo ID law in US won't fly (or at least would be much less effective). It also affect who politicians pander to. These days common strategy is to pander to radicals because it's easier to get them to vote. That would disappear if everybody has to vote.

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