Editor's Note: I welcome another contributor to the blog this week as I try and keep the blog going during this particularly busy period. Tim Johnson is an Assistant Professor at the Atkinson Graduate School of Management,
Willamette University.
Earlier this month, President Obama claimed that mandatory voting “may
end up being a better strategy” than campaign finance reform for those who
want to remove money from politics. Like clockwork, a partisan divide emerged
on the topic, with conservatives
arguing that mandatory voting violated the First Amendment and the
Huffington Post running the unambiguous headline “President
Obama Is Right: It’s Time for Mandatory Voting.” This predictable partisan split,
like President Obama’s idea, raises ire without offering any new thoughts about
how to spur turnout. So, here’s an idea I don’t think any party has ever
considered: election officials should adopt an open-source, publicly-verifiable
computer program that randomly-assigns votes to uncast ballots.
Yes, you read that right, the ballots of non-voters should
be filled out for them.
Now, needless to say, this proposal has no hopes of ever
being implemented, but I think it would increase turnout. By randomly assigning
votes, the computer program would not affect election outcomes. It would simply
create noise around the popular will signaled by citizens who actually
registered their votes. Yet, that noise would create an incentive for
individuals to actually cast a ballot.
Not making sense? Let me explain further.
First, remember that randomization assigns an equal
probability to each of a given set of outcomes. Thus, if our outcomes
represent, say, candidates running for a political office, then
randomly-assigning the votes of those who don’t cast ballots would simply mean
that every candidate would get an equal uptick in their final vote tally. Thus,
if 10,000 voters failed to turnout in a two-candidate contest, then each
candidate would get, on average, 5,000 additional, randomly-assigned votes.
Those random votes, however, would be added to the votes of folks who actually
cast ballots. As a result, the random votes would effectively cancel out and
the voters who cast ballots would continue to determine the election outcome.
And I bet the latter group of voters would grow if this
system were implemented. Think about it. If you are an anti-deficit,
Duck-Dynasty watching, faith-based Tea Partier, could you sleep at night
knowing that your ballot has some probability of adding to the electoral count
of a big-spending, latte-drinking, politically-correct Democrat? Not a chance.
Same goes for the latte drinkers thinking about the John Birchers getting their
votes. The revulsion of supporting a personally-objectionable political cause
would encourage folks to take the active step of casting a ballot.
Therein rests the beauty of this system. Whereas mandatory
voting takes away the right to abstain from an election and coerces
participation through the threat of sanction, a system of randomly-assigning
votes coerces participation by highlighting the link between casting a ballot
and advancing a political cause that one supports. That is to say, mandatory
voting scolds the citizen, whereas a system that randomly allocates votes reminds
the citizen that ballots carry political consequences.
Of course, to realize such a system, a variety of
potentially insurmountable technical hurdles would need to be overcome. Somehow
the randomization algorithm would need to be rigorously verified and insulated
from hackers. Also, there might need to be an escape clause for close elections
in which randomization might very well tip the scales arbitrarily for one
candidate. Such problems would be vexing and should probably doom this proposal;
indeed, I’m not even sure I would support it. Still, I would rather have our national
political discussion focus on a system that convinces individuals about the political
consequences of their votes, instead of a system that reprimands citizens for
not casting them.
1 comment:
Wow. That is a scintillatingly shallow view of the American voter. Don't you think even a public school victim would figure out rather quickly that adding X-votes to both sides of the equation is the same as adding zero to both sides? Or are we truly that far removed from reason in this country?
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