[E-voting] Turnout

[Adrian Colley]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 04:20:13PM +0100, Michael McMahon wrote:
> There are much simpler ways to improve turnout. I missed the local
> elections this year because I was on holiday. Simply allowing people
> to vote on a couple of different days would help. And it might even be
> easier to do this with electronic voting than with the old system
> (though it might require a constitutional amdmt)

Joe McCarthy suggested that people could vote at their nearest
convenient polling station on the day of the election, instead of having
to travel across the country to their place of registration.  Of course,
it would mean casting a ballot appropriate to your home constituency
instead of the one you're physically voting in, which would mean
probably printing one out in the polling station.  We have the
technology for this, I'm sure.  It would significantly boost turnout,
especially among students and the hard-of-commuting.

While we're all on our soap boxes, I think it's more important to get
people to think about how their vote should be cast, instead of
encouraging them to turn up out of a sense of grudging duty (or legal
compulsion) and giving their #1 to the candidate whose face seems most
familiar.  Australia compels people to vote, and as a result they have
(a) very high turnout; and (b) lots of protest votes for the likes of
the More Beer Party[1].  Democratic will, like any signal, does not
benefit from the addition of random noise.

 --Adrian.

[1] Are you listening, Diageo?

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