Sept/Oct 2013
Neg: Decrease Quality of System
foundationbriefs.com
Page 62 of 104
Mandatory Voting would Decrease Quality of System
Those who Do Not Want to Vote Do Not Make Good Voters AMS
Armin Shafer. Republican Liberty and Compulsory Voting Max Planck
Institute for the Study of Societies November 2011.
Low rates of participation, however, might not just be irrelevant for the quality of democracy but
actually be away to improve it. Since nonvoters tend to be less well-informed and less interested in
politics, it might be a blessing in disguise if they stayed at home on Election Day (Rosema 2007). Voluntary voting separates the truly interested from the ill-informed and confused, who hold misguided opinions about politics (McClosky 1964: 376). Taking this argument one step further, Brennan (2009) argues that people who are likely to vote badly because they are uniformed or ignorant have amoral duty not to vote since they would pollute the polls. Caplan (2007: 198) lends support to this idea, as he finds that many citizens hold irrational beliefs about the economy, i.e., their opinions deviate from those of PhD students in economics. Since economic literacy, so constructed, rises with formal education, low and uneven turnout is advantageous because in this case the median voter will be more economically competent than the median citizen. Efforts to increase voter turnout would harm the epistemic quality of democracy.
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