{"id":1949,"date":"2005-11-18T00:03:07","date_gmt":"2005-11-18T07:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1949"},"modified":"2005-11-18T00:03:07","modified_gmt":"2005-11-18T07:03:07","slug":"does-making-voting-more-convenient-reduce-voter-turnout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1949","title":{"rendered":"Why People Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting article in last week’s New York Times Magazine<\/em> asked, why do people vote<\/a>? The odds of anyone’s vote changing an election’s outcome are virtually nil (unless one happens to be on the US Supreme Court, that is), so why does anyone bother?\n\n

The Swiss recently switched to a vote-by-mail system – and they did it gradually, district by district, enabling social scientists to get a good measure of how such a system changes voting behavior.<\/p>\n

Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a rainstorm; the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly. An economic model would therefore predict voter turnout to increase substantially. Is that what happened?<\/p>\n

Not at all. In fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the smaller communities within cantons. This finding may have serious implications for advocates of Internet voting – which, it has long been argued, would make voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates that the exact opposite might hold true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The theory the article suggests is that in countries in which there’s a strong belief that voting is a civic obligation, people vote so that other people can see them voting<\/em>. So a vote-by-mail option, by making it less necessary for people to be seen voting to get social credit for voting, actually reduces <\/em>the reason for people to vote.<\/p>\n

If that theory is correct, then what policy – short of manditory voting, which I think is a good idea that will never happen here (if we can make taxpaying and jury duty manditory duties of citizens, why not voting?) – should we use to encourage voting? Perhaps the “I voted” stickers should be made of nicer material and be more prominent.<\/pracut>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting article in last week’s New York Times Magazine asked, why do people vote? The odds of anyone’s vote changing an election’s outcome are virtually nil (unless one happens to be on the US Supreme Court, that is), so … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}