[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]President Obama caused a brief media furor last week when he publicly floated the idea of mandatory voting, citing compulsory voting laws in countries like Australia. Amid cries from Republicans (and others) noting that the practice of not voting is protected by free speech, the administration felt the need to publicly back down from the statement, with White House press secretary Josh Earnest saying, “The president was not making a specific policy prescription for the United States.”
[HONOR KILLINGS A TRAGEDY THAT MUST BE STOPPED AT HOME AND ABROAD]
The president’s concern over the issue of lack of participation from the American voting public is justified. Last year’s midterm election saw the lowest turnout percentage of eligible voters nationwide for the last 70 years. Utah itself set a new low record with only 28.8 percent of voters casting ballots in the election. Clearly, the American public at large is not incentivized to vote. This is a serious problem for our representative democracy, especially since groups like the Pew Research Center frequently find the demographics of those who do vote skew towards old, white and rich.
Instead of providing those who don’t vote with incentives to get to the polls, perhaps we should consider what prevents them from voting. It seems plausible that the lack of statistical efficacy of any one vote cast is hard to justify against the costs of voting. Students, the poor, the working and politically marginalized individuals in areas that have historically discriminated against them at polling places — there are excellent reasons why the opportunity cost of driving to a polling place to cast an ineffective vote is too high for many of these people to justify the decision. How, then, can we lower this cost and make it worthwhile for our voting system to reflect the wishes of the majority?
The answer to a data collection issue caused by inefficiency is obvious: make voting an online activity. This would negate any political pressure exercised at polling places and make voting something one could do at the office, from home or on a smartphone quickly and conveniently. The associated costs of a visit to a polling location would thus be much better balanced against the minimal effect of an individual voting, not to mention that this would be a huge outreach to the forever-neglected “youth vote.”
The obvious question raised by this proposal is that of voter identification and tech security. How to verify that people are who they say they are and prevent voter fraud? Well, we’ve invested an obscene amount in the most intrusive online state security system of all time; I’m sure that in a world where all meaningful and important interactions take place online, that we can come up with an effective way to verify identity.
Additionally, tech security and rigged results are not a new issue. Florida 2000, anyone? Issues posed by multiple corruptible Diebold nodes are probably better solved via a central security system not subject to the whims of scrutiny from local authorities. Aside from the identity verification issue, code could be written similar to that of Bitcoin, where verified transactions are integral to the operation of the system, public and irreversible, guaranteeing that final results could not be tampered with.
The crux issue in getting more people to vote is minimizing transaction costs that disincentivize certain blocs from voting. A successful model for online voting would achieve a great reduction of those costs and could help restore a semblance of majority representation in democratic elections, both at the state and federal level.
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