Sept/Oct 2013 Neg: Voting Against Own Interests foundationbriefs.com Page 56 of 104 A dearth of informed voters turns elections into exercises of random probability, DAT Jakee, Keith, and Martin Kenneally. Increasing Voter Turnout What Difference Can Compulsory Voting Make Florida Atlantic University, 2009. If abstainers are less interested and less informed
about the political process, as per Jakee & Sun (2006), Lacy and Burden (1999), or Lassen (2005), then it is even less clear that increasing their presence in the election is a desirable objective. The reason is that their votes can effectively be treated as random (Jakee and Sun 2006) and, if this is an accurate assumption, forcing them to vote causes the CVR outcome
to become increasingly random, as the percentage of involuntary voters (P) increases. Indeed, this specific scenario of a very high abstention rate and low voter turnout is one,
according to our analysis, in which a CVR can make a difference compared to a VVR.
However, implementing a CVR in this case may turn the election outcome into something akin to a coin toss because of the large percentage of purely random votes. Determining an election by a random coin toss surely implies an electoral result that is wholly unreflective of any underlying community preferences further weakening the argument in favor of imposing a CVR.
A CVR is a compulsory voting rule a VVR is a voluntary voting rule. The authors of the study used statistical analysis of multiple election scenarios, altering variables for turnout, whether a seat was safe, Share with your friends: