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 42 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com contribute to the collective action problem of electing a bad government by casting bad/uninformed votes that skew outcomes in favor of less qualified candidates. This is a more controversial view, and affirmatives could answer in a variety of ways. One response is that voters should just generally trust the democratic process —candidates that aren’t thoroughly vetted wouldn’t appear on the ballot, and we should, as a general principle, have trust and confidence in our public leaders even when we disagree with them on policy points. However, the flip side of this coin is that compulsory voting arguments that claim that voluntary voting undermines left-wing candidates are flawed in the same way. If democratic procedure is what counts, then outcomes shouldn’t matter. A second line of response to Lijphart’s argument is that forcing voters to turnout removes their ability to abstain in protest. A more extreme, and consequentialist, form of this argument would be to claim that compulsory voting gives oppressive governments a democratic façade, behind which to be oppressive. The right to abstain in protest is deeply rooted in any theory of democracy, so this argument is persuasive. But denying voters the right to abstain in protest also impacts to a value of quality representation if voters truly believe that none of the candidates on the ballot are worthy of their vote, then regardless of how they cast their ballot they will be misrepresenting themselves. The affirmative has a couple decent responses available to them. First, if the affirmative defends the secret ballot, then protest voters could, hypothetically, scrawl anarchy symbols on the ballot in lieu of actually voting. (I’m actually unclear on how this would work in voting systems which use computerized voting booths. Second, the affirmative could specify that they defend a compulsory vote, but with the stipulation that the ballot would have a box which voters could check to signify that they do not want to cast a vote for any of the candidates. A significant number of voters in Russia usually check this box. However in both of these cases, the question remains as to why compulsory voting is uniquely preferable to voluntary voting if nonvoters can cast the equivalent of a non-vote. Lijphart hints at several other potential benefits of compulsory voting, and other authors in the literature usually mention some combination of the following 1) Compulsory voting might incentivize politically alienated voters to read upon what their options are and make an informed choice, 2) Compulsory voting may reduce the impact of sectional politics by forcing politicians to be responsive to a broader constituent base, 3) Voluntary voting systems create a free-riding scenario where nonvoters benefit from having an electoral, democratic government without doing their part to maintain the system. |