Posts by Moz
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Chris Waugh,
No, you didn't. You said you wanted some kind of rationale
And the very next sentence was
Moz said: Saying "it's easier to measure" or "the media will accept it" or, worse, "the existing voters will accept it" doesn't seem a very sensible stance to me
But then you say
The only valid reason to cancel a citizen's right to vote should be death.
So once they have the vote it doesn't matter what they do or what condition they're in. It's just that they don't get the vote until they reach a suitable age. Which is currently 18 in NZ, 21 in some other countries and there's no reason it shouldn't be the age when almost everyone has reached mental maturity. If you have to pick a number why not pick one that has a bit of reasoning behind it rather than just "it's a convenient number".
I'm actually torn by that one, since the evidence we have is that mental maturity arrives between 25 and 30 for most people. But it's backed by increasing evidence (not just age of criminal action), so it'd be justifiable that way. I would prefer "can read and reason" rather than "acts responsibly", but either beats "it seemed like a good idea 150 years ago".
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I think people in Syria have bigger things to worry about than deciding who to vote for in NZ.
Again you're saying "that's hard" as a reason for not doing it. I'm pointing at a disparity and asking why it exists. If it helps, imagine you have a kiwi soldier in Syria working with a kiwi UN employee. They work side by side, and both have been there for four years. The soldier can vote, the UN worker can't. Why?
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Chris Waugh,
and a minimum age is the simplest way to do that.
I explcitly said that I didn't consider "it's simple" as sufficient reason to do it. It would be even simpler to run a one man, one vote system where each voter nominated their successor when they wanted to retire. Most of us don't consider that acceptable either.
Yes, it's difficult to decide who is competant to vote but we already have complex rules and case law on the issue, so needing that is not an effective argument against having it. Unless you're suggesting that we change the current law to a strictly age-based one? I'm proposing that we extend the competance provisions to everyone in the name of "universal suffrage", partly to simplify things by removing some silly edge cases.
You have your Taiwan/China example backwards. Taiwanese already have the same voting rights as Mainlanders in PRC elections.
I thought the PRC was the little island, not the big chunk of asia? But anyway, both sides claim all of it and then some. I'm arguing that both states (all, if we're talking about the other disputed territories) involved should therefore enfranchise all residents of the areas they claim. Obviously I also think that they should introduce democracy, that being a prerequisite for enfranchisement...
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I'm not sure if many of those counterpoints are accurate
You seem to have a Key-esque understanding of "many", in that a possible interpretation issue with one of four examples does not mean "many inaccuracies" in conventional english. So, to be pedantic, "there exist prisoners who can vote". Happy?
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Steve Parks,
So who are the people currently not allowed to vote that you think should be able to?
All the ones who can understand what voting is. I've said this before but I'm happy to say it again, that I'm happy with a geographical restriction (only people legally resident in NZ), but beyond that I don't see any reason to deny the franchise to those who want it.
I prefer my arbitrary lines to have some kind of rationale. Saying "it's easier to measure" or "the media will accept it" or, worse, "the existing voters will accept it" doesn't seem a very sensible stance to me. Why is a 15 year old taxpayer not able to vote, but an 18 year old in prison able to? Why is someone in the final stages of dementia able to vote but someone involuntarily committed for depression not able to? Why is someone with a mental age of ten but who happens to be twenty able to vote, but not vice versa? Why is someone working for the UN in Syria not able to vote, but someone in Afghanistan for the army able to?
I'd like to see universal suffrage, not "universal (conditions apply)" suffrage. Every person should be able to vote for their government, times however many governments claim jurisdiction. So, for example, the US claims a mandate to impose an acceptable government in Iraq, therefore everyone in Iraq gets to vote for US presidents and federal members. Likewise Taiwanese in Chinese ones (hey, you claim the territory, an important step is granting your citizens there the vote, right?)
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Richard Aston,
What about online voting?
That's been discussed, and generally the more people understand it the less they like it. By which I mean that scientists who study it don't believe it can be made to work, computer secutiy people regard it as outright impossible (some of them even in theory!) and every attempt has either been carefully shielded from scrutiny or has been shown to have major flaws... or both. Using it means choosing which parts of the current system to give up - it can be cheaper, or more accurate, or more convenient to get to, or easier to use, but probably at most one of those things (and likely all of them will suffer for the first few runs... you know, those tests of the new system where we get a real government as a result).
The problem is that our distributed, paper-based system is the result of much experimentation and experience over a long period. Online voting is new and shiny, and even if we can work the bugs out of it much faster than we did with paper ballots, that gives us 3-20 elections where we are testing an experimental voting machine.
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I’ll promise you this. If you win, I’ll step aside from the party, to let you and your supporters mould it into the party you want
That's a good idea. I think it would be healthier for Labour to split into official parties of the centre and left and whatever, rather than continue the cats in a sack stuff that's been going on. That way they could form explicit coalitions with each other with clear boundaries. Or perhaps make the current problems explicit by immediately ruling out ever going into coalition with each other, and instead competing to be best friends with The Key Party and Winston First.
It will be hard, though, because the bought media are still struggling to come to terms with MMP, or unwilling to frame things outside the "looney left"-centre-right spectrum that they've used to such devastating effect for the lastr few years.
Given Labours strong focus on winning electorates, a deliberate overhang strategy might be workable - get all the MPs with strong electorate followings to band together into "the real Labour Party", put a bunch of more collectivst MPs into "the modern Labour Party", and perhaps some of the more experienced members could form "Old Labour - the brand you can rely on".
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Steve Parks,
Digressing a bit: I also think that the voting age should be lowered to 16, and that all (or most) prisoners should be able to vote.
Why 16, and why only prisoners rather than all disqualified persons?
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to BenWilson,
You could certainly believe in democracy without being a libertarian.
I question the extent to which someone can be a libertarian and believe in democracy, however. Libertarianism requires strong limits on state power, much stronger than have ever been accepted by any modern state. The closest would possibly be India or Sudan before their respective partitions, but even then both states claimed the right to levy taxes and enforce laws regardless of the consent of those they were enforcing them on, and without any prior agreement that they might do so.
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to bmk,
... to laws that force people to go somewhere or do something
To get a driver's license I have to go the the issuing centre. To get out of jury duty I need to turn up to court and look dodgy. To enter the country I need to turn up to customs when they can be bothered attending. The legal issue exists even without compulsory voting
I think any law that compels an action from someone needs to have really strong benefits to outweigh the loss of freedom
I think democracy is a pretty strong benefit. Letting people opt out is if anything worse than letting them opt out of paying taxes. Admittedly I think we should stop people doing that as well, but I realise I've lost that argument.