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Debates should be mandatory for frontrunners, voting should be compulsory
Compulsory voting works best as a deterrent to disenfranchisement. It's not great when it just becomes a rent on people in districts with deplorable voting infrastructure and registration policies.
This may or may not give you the outcome you're looking for. There are absolutely still people out there who don't pay that much attention to politics and having a bunch of people vote for a random name could be disastrous.
Why do Americans always act like other countries don’t exist?
Whenever these kinds of things get brought up Americans act like these are radical new ideas that have never been tried before so obviously we must carefully consider the potential issues in the purely theoretical.
You aren’t that special. Universal health care works. Gun control works. Mandatory voting works. All of these things have been tried in other countries and have been policy for decades or centuries in those countries.
You don’t have to speculate on what might happen based on zero information. You can use the oodles of real world data at your fingertips where these are tried and tested solutions to problems.
You are absolutely ruining our conservatives' simple minded theories with all your real world facts. All of their ivory tower theories start out with the assumption that you do not exist.
e.g. "If people can get free health care they will go to see doctors just for fun and then things will cost too much!"
I like how this was just one point and you went off on your anti-american rant. I'm all for the first two out of the three that you mentioned there.
Congratulations, you have assumed and now you are an ass.
I didn’t assume anything, your point was “well if we tried that, what if this thing happened” like there is no way to tell. There IS a way to tell, look at the other countries that have already done this.
It’s irrelevant whether or not you are for or against the examples I used. I just find it uniquely American to act like if it isn’t currently what Americans do, then nobody must have ever tried it and to speak of the idea as if it is purely theoretical.
If you’re against it and care, then next time instead of fear mongering in the theoretical, you can educate yourself and offer an informed opinion instead, using real data from the many countries where this is already a thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting
Again, I never acted like that. This is a bold assumption on your part.
I'm aware of countries that take part such as Australia or Belgium. As such I'm aware of their faults too. You know the uninformed voters I was referring to? That's called a donkey vote sometimes. Your system fails to address that. Add on the logistics of tracking participation, dealing with penalties and what have you even accomplished? It genuinely sounds as if you want to control an aspect of peoples lives that should not be controlled.
Oh and since you're so very interested in American culture and what makes us different, has it ever occurred to you that with how nasty things can get on election days that compulsory voting with penalties might just be a further punishment to those already having unfortunate experiences? Republicans are known to harass and heckle other voters at the polls.
Look, there's a lot of things I believe we could adopt from other countries but there's also a lot of work to be done in general. We're not ready for something like this. Your attitudes and assumptions have shown that you are quite uninformed yourself for someone who claims to be so knowledgeable.
In your initial comment, you said “having people vote for a random name could be disastrous”. That is pure speculation, based on nothing. Other countries do it and have for a very long time, it is absolutely not “disastrous”. Flawed? Possibly, all systems are. But perfectly functional and as good or better than optional voting.
Thinking that Americans for whatever reason are unable to do this when other culturally similar countries can manage just fine and have without anything “disastrous” occurring can only be interpreted in one of two ways:
You aren’t aware that this already occurs in other countries and thus are just speculating randomly with no information.
You think Americans are special in one way or another, and evidence from other countries where this is successfully used isn’t applicable because “reasons”.
I assumed it was option 1. From your follow up comment, it’s clear that it is actually option 2. I apologize for assuming you were uninformed, but option 2 is arguably much worse. It’s still American exceptionalism, just not a positive version.
Personally, I think you could handle it and it would be an improvement. Despite you branding me as anti-American, I apparently have more faith in your countries competence than you do.
It will never happen for a myriad of reasons, but they have nothing to do with the efficacy of compulsory voting, and everything to do with those in power knowing how to effectively manipulate the current system.
It could be but if a candidate is that disasterous to being voted in then I'm sure they'd have heard about that candidate too. In the long run it'd probably have people more informed before they vote since they'll have to do it.
I feel like this might just be a culturally difference or something.
There are absolutely plenty of Americans who would just pick random names to get it over with. Even if we had a much more organized system that actually provided everyone with pamphlets educating them on candidates people here would still ignore it.