If you want more people to vote, a good start would be to move the election to say saturday from a flipping tuesday (or declare it a national holiday) or stop closing all the polling places in certain neighborhoods or stop preventing them from voting at all. Let's start with those and we're probably fine.

well this is a surprise to me because i live in mass. i wonder why we dont hear about this more? could it be that all these libs are not forward thinking enuff to realize this could happen in a blue state? and i live in a city that is 65% minority and i still cant find anyone who does not have an i.d. but 2morrow i will begin a new search and post any exciting results

You're asking everyone in your city if they have ID? Presumably, eventually, you'll find someone who doesn't have sufficient ID, what happens then? What comes next?

I didn't vote. Voting is on shaky grounds, logically. You take time out of your day, and your vote has about as much chance of influencing the outcome of an election as though you voted for Cthulhu to burn it all down. So, in a way it makes sense to force people to do it. Force provides an adequate reason. Though I'd probably vote for Cthulhu to burn it all down.

yea right. how did that forcing people to buyin to obamacare work out for obama?

I know a lot of people who couldn't vote on Saturday.

i dont think i will find anyone without i.d. let me explain why. you need to have health ins. in mass. yup thats right without it you can get fined. but if you dont have enuff dough you can get masshealth which is better than the gold plan of obamacare, but to get this you need an i.d. see if you make the carrot big enuff on the stick taking that 40 mile roundtrip to get an i.d. is nothing. isn't life grand. romneycare works for the exact reason obamacare does not. the libs in mass dont care about making less income and helping the needy until the taxes get to high. thats why we have a republican governor now. the junk got too crazy and now they want baker to fix it. this was the first clue that trump or whatever republican was nominated was a shoe-in to win. libs are just catching up but soon they will see the folly of thier ways and send bernie to the rescue, only by then he will be 78 and he will get mccained

So you've independently confirmed that everyone has ID. I was just curious about what you were planning to say to someone if they didn't have ID. Like, if Joe Homeless had no ID and was like "what's this about?" I was curious what you'd tell him.

what part of what i posted did you not understand. folks in mass need i.d. to do anything including being homeless. they cant get welfare, food stamps, liquor, cigarettes, use a credit card, get healthcare,go to a bar, gamble, and on and on. i did not know that they need an i.d. to vote until i read the post in this forum. i have not said i will not find anyone i just think that there is a strong case for me not finding anybody cuz nobody wants to turn down handouts in this country from what i have seen and in mass you need an i.d. to get the handout.

You are not required to have ID to vote in Massachusetts unless you are a first time voter registering by mail in which case a utility bill is good enough.

edit: nope, the page I'm looking at didn't give full details, earlier link details "reasonable suspicion" or "inactive voter", my bad.

Well, you haven't actually told me what you'd say to that person who has no ID, but it sounds like you'd have a hard time finding that person in the first place, fair enough. I don't even know why you'd be out asking people whether or not they have ID. For this thread?

There's a section in 'Doing Good Better' on this, and how logically it's very much worth doing. The idea is that although there's a truly miniscule chance of your vote making a difference, if it does, the payoff is so high that the average worth of your vote could be quite a bit. It isn't logically correct to stop weighing chance and payoff when something becomes particularly unlikely. He does some back-of-the-letter envelope math that shows your vote could be worth $200+.

Think of it this way - if the person you love most in the world is in hospital about to die, and you can give blood with a 0.1% chance of them surviving because of it, are you going to do it? Of course - even though it almost certainly won't make a difference, and comes at a small cost to you, the potential benefit of keeping them around is so high that it's easily worth it.

Of course if you think the parties are the same and it makes no difference, then yeah, voting isn't worth it. And that analysis doesn't take into account whether you're in a swing state or not. But 'my vote will never make a difference' alone doesn't hold up.

That's a good point. It would be worth it if you attached sufficiently high pay-offs to electing a candidate. I didn't think of it that way because I personally don't place very high pay-offs. You convinced me.

add: At the same time though, this is like saying an election is much like going to the movies, and how much you enjoy the movie, because the "envelop" is entirely psychic, as unless it's in a bathroom stall, there's no real pay-off. Isn't this another way of saying democracy is a kind of performance art?

Using what I will assume to be your extremely charitable assumptions to come up with this $200 figure it would still not be worth it for some people. And that's assuming that you are smart enough to vote for the "right" person thst will make that difference. There is also the chance you err and cost yourself $200 which I assume they don't take into consideration. Even a 10-20% chance of a mistake erodes into your value pretty quickly and makes voting wrong even in this outlier election

If the US election had compulsory voting, Clinton would have won as the uninformed voters that would tend to be your absentee voters as well would vote democratic which is the same here in Australia and this is why this system of voting artificially inflates the progressive vote.

One thing though that negates this is that many of these uninformed voters vote informal here in Australia (i.e. their vote doesn't count due to them not filling out the ballot paper correctly which can be done on purpose as well as a form of a protest vote) which I understand wouldn't be as much of an issue for you Americans with your electronic voting system.

However, with your electronic system and my understanding that you can only select one of the candidates to enter your vote, I would have thought that your system would be less democratic with people still having the right to place an informal vote with our use of ballot papers still.

I can actually see there being more movement towards electronic voting here in Australia to keep the progressive's primary vote up.

The value is for the country, not for you as a person. You'd need off-the-planet assumptions to make it worth $200 for any single person.

And re: you might make the wrong choice: well yeah, but that's an argument against voting overall, so they don't need to take that into consideration because they're arguing purely that your vote has value, which could be good or bad. The overall point is that your vote has some EV which is not 0, and if you have political conviction then it's incorrect to say 'I think x should win, but my vote is meaningless so I won't bother'.

edit: Also, to be clear it isn't even about whether the value is >= your hourly or whatever. The point is that lots of people like the idea of contributing to their democracy with their vote but operate under the assumption that because it has a basically 0 chance of deciding an election it makes literally 0 difference. I have a feeling that if a lot of people could see that their vote would 'contribute' even just $5 to the country they'd make the effort

$200/vote would be $47,000,000,000 given the 235M voting age adults in the US.

Seem excessive, but I'll happily take the $200.

did/does anyone do polling of the non-voters to see which way they would have voted if forced? Guessing about 60/40 for HC

we don't which is why this discussion is pointless

1. I would never support mandatory voting. Someone should not be forced to participate in such an activity against their will.

2. If you ever did enact such mandatory voting, there should be a "None of the above" option, and if that option got the most votes, there is no winner, and you hold another election with another batch of candidates.

I think in Australia you can just submit a blank ballot if you want.

I am huge proponent of a "none if the above" option.

RON (Re-Open Nominations) is stronger and more specific than NOTA. I'd be fine with that on any ballot.

You can leave any choice blank, including the president, in the US and still have the rest of your ballot counted.

One could always vote none of the above when compelled to vote. Silence preserved.

Is it really "artificially" inflated if it reflects what the actual population prefers?