Vote for nobody
Will Morton
will at memefeeder.com
Mon Sep 6 10:25:05 PDT 2004
Justin wrote:
>On 2004-09-06T06:22:29-0700, Sarad AV wrote:
>
>
>>the election commision of india had a proposal to the
>>govt. that the voter should be able to vote for 'none
>>of the above'. Though one can predict that such a
>>proposal will never be approved by the government, it
>>makes a lot of sense. Is any other democratic country
>>seriously thinking of implementing such an option?
>>
>>
>
>
>If someone would vote for "none of the above" rather than write in
>his/her ideal candidate, that someone is a lazy oaf. Everyone who
>writes in a candidate is voting "none of the above."
>
>The 50% of the U.S. population which doesn't vote is also voting "none
>of the above" in a way. There's a difference in that some non-voters
>may slightly prefer one candidate over another, but _assuming that
>everyone has an ideal candidate_ they'd be willing to go to the polls
>for, not voting is the same as saying all the candidates are
>significantly less than the ideal.
>
>
The difference being that in a system such as Sarad describes, if
'None of the above' gets more votes than any candidate, the election is
declared void and a re-election is called (possibly excluding any of the
candidates from the first round, depending on the details); hence, the
50% of the population who think 'they're all fvckers' have a reason to
go to the polls.
I've experienced such a system in action (within a student body) and
it works well, provided you like your democracy to be loud and
participatory. For this reason it's unlikely to be implemented by an
incumbent government, though I guess it's possible an uber-populist like
Chavez or Lula might consider it.
W
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