Should Voting Be Mandatory?
Voting is not optional in 23 countries. Here’s why the United States should become the 24th
http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/21/should-voting-be-mandatory/?iid=op-main-lede&hpt=hp_bn16
I am on record as saying it should be way more difficult to get the right to vote rather than anything else, but I could support the idea of a mandatory vote if they made it at least an order of magnitude easier to vote AND allowed for ‘none of the above’ to be a legitimate choice. Then, if none-of-the-above ‘wins’ an election, then the current candidates are discarded and a new ballot is produced. This could, of course, be immensely simplified by allowing all and sundry to add their names to the ballot (trivial if done via electronics instead of paper like today) and having an instant runoff.
But heck, nothing in our dysfunctional system is going to change for the better anyway, so why bother thinking about it? Of course, that attitude means ‘they’ have already won, but at some point a body just gets tired of endless shouting into a vacuum.
