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October 12, 2004
Don't get out the Vote
Stories like this (via the Kerry spot) remind me why I do not like get out the vote campaigns. People in this story were getting paid to register voters and were paid by the voter registered, so they got people to register multiple times to get a bigger pay check. I am not opposed to helping people register when they need help, but I am opposed to registering people just for the sake of registering them. If you do not have what it takes to make the minor effort it takes to register to vote on your own, I doubt you will make the effort to make an informed vote. And if you are not making an informed vote, then you are ruining democracy. Democracy is only better than other systems when people are making an informed choice. Otherwise we might as well just pick our leaders by lottery.
Australia is even worse than the United States in this case because they make everyone vote there no matter their level of ignorance about the candidates or issues. Making people vote when they are ignorant of what they are voting for is even worse than registering lazy people.
This all reminds of me my high school civics class. We discussed each day how the government worked and focused on various current political debates. The big issue at the time was prop 187 in California which would ban illegal immigrants from certain state government services. On your eighteenth birthday my teacher would give you a voter registration card. That was good because everyone in the class had received a basic civics education, knew what the current election issues were, and having never registered before, needed the help. But even the people who I disagreed with had informed opinions, which is not the case with the multiple registrations story above.
Posted by Pete at October 12, 2004 02:12 PM
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