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
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| 13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 30 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com But the reasons why voters do not go to the polls are complex and varied Murthy 17 furthers, Poor voter turnout is also the result of such things as [*342] illiteracy, ignorance, indifference, and poverty. Further, the increasing role of money, religion, and power in the emerging democracies leads to an important debate as to the desirability of compulsory voting in modern, representative democracies. Ideally, in a modern, representative democracy, all the voters should exercise their electoral rights in every election by visiting polling stations and casting their votes however, the effective implementation of compulsory voting in emerging democracies, in the midst of enormous social and economic problems, draws a large question mark Such large questions weigh heavy in the minds of the scholars and lead a great deal of the scholarly debate to center around the rights of voters. In the US. for example, the right to vote is a protected constitutional right yet, the right not to vote has been in question. Most accounts of the Supreme Court decisions on the question of the inverse right not to vote suggest that there is no such inverse right. The decision of Singer v. United States recounted in the Harvard Law Review 18 explains why such an inverse right may not exist However, the very idea that aright, by definition, can be waived is false. n Numerous rights cannot be waived n and, although many others can, this still does not imply the general existence of inverse rights. The Supreme Court observed this in Singer v. United States, n in which it upheld a federal rule that requires government consent in order fora criminal defendant to waive his right to a jury trial. n The Court declared that "the ability to waive a constitutional right does not ordinarily carry with it the right to insist upon the opposite of that right" n and cited several examples of this principle in the context of a criminal defendant's Sixth Amendment rights the right to a public trial, the right to be tried in the state and district where the crime was committed, and the right to confront the government's witnesses. n The reason that aright does not imply its inverse is that there are competing interests at stake. An individual right may serve both a public and a private interest, and creating an absolute individual right of waiver would leave unprotected the public interest that the right serves. n The right to trial by jury is a protection of the individual [*600] from the power of the state, n but it also serves an important collective function by promoting the accuracy and legitimacy of criminal trials. n There is no inverse right to a bench trial because this would focus only on the individual interest and would ignore the collective interest. 17 Ibid. 18 See note 1. |