From: Dana Hedberg (dah@signalinteractive.com)
Date: Wed Apr 12 2000 - 10:39:55 MDT
hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> Damien Broderick, <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>, writes:
> > Equally boggling to an outsider might be *our* laws penalising those who
> > *don't* turn up at the polling booth. You're not obliged to vote, just to
> > take your pieces of paper, have your name signed off, and put them--checked
> > or otherwise--into the boxes. I rather like this practice, actually. If
> > you're going to have the pretence of free and universal representative
> > government, you might as well powerfully encourage everyone to confront the
> > choices on offer. Those who oppose compulsion can pay the fine, after all,
> > a sort of market solution.
>
> That is amazing, that the government has the right to force people to
> vote, or at least to pretend to vote.
>
> Hal
Also, it's been shown in several psychological studies that uninformed
people who vote (either through requirement, or simply coming across
names of people they know nothing about) tend to pick the first name
listed for a given position and/or the name that sounds most ethnically
similar to themselves.
I'd be interested, Damien, if you could find out how the ballots were
laid out compared to the winners of those elections.
-Dana
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