I don’t know, stick them on as a rider to some act to trade the blood of the innocent for oil or something else that will surely pass?
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a $1,000 dollar tax hike, with a $1,000 credit for your voting receipt.
Similar to the way the health care law works. You don’t have to have health insurance, but there is a liability for not doing so, payable to the IRS. And there are free plans if you are poor. But you don’t have to.
Inducement is the more American way.
But what if you’re poor and you don’t want to vote? This monetary incentive becomes a punishment.
I think the Supreme Court would view the issue as political speech, thus protected speech. I know people who refuse to vote because they don’t believe in the system. Like burning the flag, they have that right.
not at all. They can get 1,000 to vote. Or they can forgo it.
choose any number, work with the concept.
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Not quite; voting attendance is compulsory.
So long as you show up and collect your ballot paper, your obligation is fulfilled. What you write on the paper (if anything) is entirely up to you.
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Ooh, that sounds interesting. But what if you’re below poverty level, would you actually see the money? Or would you have to actually pay federal taxes of at least $1000 to get this benefit? If the latter, couldn’t a rebellious student-citizen just forego voting if the cost is not worth their time?
Australia has about 95% turnout with a $170 fine, and if you don’t even have to pay that if you just give a reason you didn’t vote (I was feeling poorly, my kooky religion says not to vote, etc.) It doesn’t take much.
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OTOH, have you seen who Australia elects?
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In my universe, yes.
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Hey, he’s not so bad
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“Intentionally doing a bad job” is the effect, but it’s not how they would see it - making people resort to supporting a privatized solution is, to most of them, doing a GOOD job. If they need to be awful leaders and public servants to get to that point, that’s just them trying to do a good job - with “a good job” defined as “privatize everything.”
Because one of the articles of faith of free market fundamentalism is that the free market would ALWAYS do it better. The free market is a moral good in and of itself.
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Australian politics has a tendency to reflect watered-down American trends with a five to ten year delay (for example, the Australian right is now quite keen on the idea of voter ID laws…).
Abbott was our Bush Jr.
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I thought John Howard was your Shrub. Or would you say he was your Reagan?
To be fair, Pauline Hanson predates Donald Trump by quite a while 
(is she still around?)
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I like your universe. Sign me up! Actually, @anon50609448 writes that the fine is waived if you can show a reason for not voting (and apparently, the bar is set very low).
Now to convince all other Americans.
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More of a Thatcher; monarchist Anglophile on a crusade to destroy the union movement and keep Australia English (or at least white).
[quote=“daneel, post:154, topic:73768”]To be fair, Pauline Hanson predates Donald Trump by quite a while 
(is she still around?)[/quote]
Hanson was politically neutralised when Howard shifted right and adopted her policies (wrapped in slightly more polite language). She ended up doing some time after being done for fraud re: electoral funding. The trial was incredibly dodgy (Abbott played a key role in driving the prosecution), but as it was a right-wing on right-wing fight and the loser was widely despised, no-one particularly cared.
Hanson is still around, and once again the leader of the One Nation party. But they’re a spent force, and she is mostly a Palinesque comedy figure these days.
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Sounds like Canada - there’s no idea from South of the Border so bad that there won’t be some attempt to adopt it 5-10 years later - usually once it’s been shown just how bad it really is. Tossing large numbers of Canadians in prison for extraordinarily long times was just the latest in bad ideas to get a little adopted here.
I’m hoping that the Liberals actually have the courage to undo some of the damage, although there’s always a political danger in any sane social policy.
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As I used to tell my crazy Canadian mate (he once unicycled across Tasmania), Canada is just Australia with the thermometer upside down.
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Yes, which I use. But you still have to get it at the DMV, it’s just a driver’s license marked ‘non-driver’. People sometimes think they’re fake, or react as if it were a leper’s license (less often now, since they look more like a normal driver license instead of being a different color). I had one bank refuse to allow me to open an account because of it; two managerial levels up couldn’t explain why, just say “I think it’s probably a policy”. My point though, was just that most of its uses have nothing to do with driving. And then I ranted a little. Sorry, that may have been off-topic.
Oops. I forgot the sarcasm tag on that one. I suppose I thought it would be contextual from the bit about registration data being leaked. (Thinking of December’s voter data breach and the caucus/primary shame-mails about when your nearby neighbors voted, with names and addresses etc.)
Businesses have been dealing with data at the national or international level for several hundred years. We’ve had mail, telegraph, and telephone far more than 20 years. I can see that there could be some difficulty separating the ‘who is voting’ from the ‘who are they voting for’, since both pieces of data would presumably need to be sent together. Possibly the ballot could be sent in an anonymous envelope inside the envelope that tells who is voting and what district they’re participating on behalf of, and they could be processed separately. Not sure if that’s how they do it, but at least 3 states have mail voting and many have figured out some way to do absentee voting. So it doesn’t really seem to be a technical limitation on where you can vote from.
Rather seems like every aspect has negatives:
- public record - harassment/threats/harm
- registration - bureaucracy and data breaches (possible harassment/threats/harm)
- identification requirements - expense, bureaucracy, and disenfranchisement (possible harassment/threats/harm)
- anonymity - possibility for people to vote more than once
I tend to lean toward allowing people to vote anonymously anywhere. We just need some way to make it difficult to do more than once. Maybe have voting at the DMV. There’s no way you’d get through the line there more than once on a single election day. 
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No worries.
But yeah, I kind of need the tag because my parents preached against the use of this particular form of irony (that, and no Barbie since it gives young girls false sense of self-worth) so my sarcasm radar is almost non-existent. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
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Not everyone has ID in the states? öO
