I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc

13NFL1-Compulsory Voting
Page 152 of 163
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DIFFERENTIAL VOTER TURNOUT RATES MAY SIMPLY EMPOWER THOSE WITH Ab bGREATER INTEREST IN THE OUTCOME OF A VOTE
Ben Saunders Temporary Lecturer in Philosophy, Increasing Turnout A Compelling Case
Politics
: 2010 Vol. 30(1), 70
–77 Moreover, it has recently been argued not only that equality may not be necessary to democracy
(Estlund, 2008; see Saunders, forthcoming, but that there may even be democratic reasons for unequal voting (Brighouse and Fleurbaey, forthcoming Heyd and Segal, 2006). Suppose we accept the principle that all affected interests ought to have a say in decision-making (Goodin,
2007). It is puzzling why those who are unequally affected by a decision ought nonetheless to have equal votes. Instead, it seems that fairness requires those who have more at stake to receive a greater say in the decision, and one way to grant them this is to give them more votes or more weighty votes. There are, of course, various ways that this could be done
– for instance we could give all individuals the same number of votes to divide as they wished across a number of issues to be decided simultaneously, thus in effect allowing individual voters to engage in intra- personal logrolling, by giving up their vote on one issue in exchange fora greater say on another. Few, if any, democracies use such formal weighted voting mechanisms. The freedom to vote, or not vote, however, may have just this effect. Lijphart is right to suggest that differential voting rates are, in effect, like weighted voting, but wrong to assume that this is necessarily a problem
– it may in fact be a merit of voting systems that allow individual choice. Since voting carries some, albeit moderate, cost, we may assume that individuals are less likely to vote unless they have good reason to do so. Those who bother going to the polls are likely to have some cause, whether self-interested or otherwise, that makes it worth the cost to them of voting.

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