Public Service Announcement...
Shamelessly cadged from aussiedave because he:-
a)said everything that I wanted to, and
b)writes better than wot I do.
DOING YOUR DUTY...and I seriously fucking mean it. This is your duty. Yes, you, reading this now. I'm not going to mince words or be diplomatic ( Read more... )
a)said everything that I wanted to, and
b)writes better than wot I do.
DOING YOUR DUTY...and I seriously fucking mean it. This is your duty. Yes, you, reading this now. I'm not going to mince words or be diplomatic ( Read more... )
The second point is just wrong.
Look, I find discussing this interesting, but implying that "because we haven't had the same government for 800 years..." is relevant to this is pretty disingenuous, isn't it? I mean, preferences change, okay, is that really a rebuttal of my point that basing an argument on something which will not happen isn't valid?
Good. So no intrinsic value in people voting, but a value in people having the ability to decide who runs the country?
And the problems:
1. How do these people self select? Unless you argue that a particular parties supporters turn out more than anothers, I'm not sure this is a problem. Even then, people who care more vote more doesn't seem like a bad plan to me.
2. I don't assert that I don't participate in the electoral process at all. I've said nothing about what I do or don't do. I also don't make a proposal for electoral reform. I ALSO don't propose a sampling system - I just point out that as long as sufficient people vote, additional votes are very much unnecessary.
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I vote for various reasons, (and I don't always vote.) My most compelling reason recently was that even a 1/1,000,000 chance of being the vote that kicked Labour out of office after it emerged that their war was illegal, and intelligence was distorted, was worth 30 minutes. If we had done that, no party would ever dare do such evil again. Sadly, we didn't.
On a slightly different tack, there is only one reason I wouldn't happily support a system where an understanding of economics, the demographics of the UK, politics, and other things would qualify you to be one of a relatively small number of electors. That reason is that it would be entirely unacceptable, as people who don't vote, or who vote on party prejudice, or out of habit, would see themselves as disenfranchised.
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In practice, the people I'm targeting are the people who read my LJ; mostly educated, mostly intelligent people with a fair grasp of national issues.
I'm also not just pushing people to the polling station. Point #2, above, is all about informing yourself before voting. I want people to think about what the issues are, inform themselves as to who backs which issues, and to vote accordingly.
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I just strongly disagree with the everyone should vote thing :-)
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(aside: some people would argue that many people are disenfranchised now. Not every vote has equal value in our system)
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- And forgive me if I assumed that you don't vote, given that you are stridently arguing that it is pointless to vote. :)
- I was expressing myself in hyperbole for effect, but I wouldn't have said my argument was wholly disingenuous. You've said that voting patterns don't change; and yet governments rarely remain in power in this country for more than three terms. Now, that gives a swing in popular opinion of about once every twelve-to-fifteen years, which is reasonably staid, but it's hardly static, and swings in this country have amounted to more than a hundred seats changing hands in one election before now. It may also mean that the majority of voters are unchanging in their views, while a minority of marginal voters decide the outcome of each election, but that just reinforces the value of voting if you belong to the margin.
- I didn't say that there's no value in people voting. I acknowledged that one person can't realistically affect the outcome of an election. My concern is that if one vote is meaningless, that doesn't make thirty-thousand votes thirty-thousand times as meaningless. The more people who vote a particular way, the more likely they are to affect the outcome of an election. And it's the marginal voters - the people with no strong history one way or another, the ones who tend to create swings - who I most often hear saying there's no point voting.
- They self-select by choosing to vote, of course. And, as you say, it's no bad thing that the people most likely to vote are the people who care most, but likening a self-selecting voting populace to a stastically-valid sample is meaningless. No formal selection or standardisation process has been undertaken. It doesn't reflect the populace. In that case, and in the absence of a formal sampling system, I will be happier that the majority of the population is represented the closer to an (admittedly impossible) 100% turnout we get.
- Again, I apologise if I misconstrued your argument against voting as a statement that you don't vote. Why are you arguing against voting? Do you find that you frequently take part in exercises that you argue against?
And sufficient for what? Unnecessary for what? Sure, an election was held, a representative was selected, and because we gave everyone a chance to choose, we assume that the majority of people either back the elected representative or are happy either way. But it's fantastically arbitrary.
My constituency last saw a Tory victory by 475 votes. Thirty thousand people didn't turn out to vote. How confident are you that, out of those those thirty-thousand people, there aren't 476 more Labour supporters than Tory supporters? What if the wrong guy was chosen?
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Give me a while to get my mind back into the real world and then I'll try and join in again....
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