Ideas on how to achieve 90%+ voter turnout rate

Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
I thought this was an idea worth discussing here;

"You want ideas? I could, for just a billion dollars, change politics forever, and for the better, and put the country on the right track, but my idea would never be backed by Big Money because it would be political suicide for them.

my plan:

Make voting mandatory.

Give everyone the day off to vote (replace presidents day with election day)

Make voting easy, safe and secure (if you can pay your taxes online, you should be able to vote online as well)

Make it a national lottery - 1,000 American voters will win a million USD.

99% voter turnout guaranteed

republic saved from oligarchical state of plutonomy™

and USA lived happily ever after

will never happen, of course"

Coming from a thread on Reddit: "In the last 5 years, the 200 most politically active companies in the US spent $5.8 billion influencing our government with lobbying and campaign contributions. Those same companies got $4.4 trillion in taxpayer support -- earning a return of 750 times their investment."

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/32owtd/in_the_last_5_years_the_200_most_politically/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-silver/taxation-without-represen_1_b_7069384.html


Thoughts?
 
Observe & Report

Observe & Report

Well-Known Member
Online voting is a much harder problem than online tax payment because tax payments aren't secret from the government and nobody else wants to pay my taxes or pay taxes for people that don't exist...
 
Padawanbater2

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
Observe & Report said:
Online voting is a much harder problem than online tax payment because tax payments aren't secret from the government and nobody else wants to pay my taxes or pay taxes for people that don't exist...
Click to expand...
What's the difference between physical voting and online voting? Don't the same risks apply to both?
 
Observe & Report

Observe & Report

Well-Known Member
Padawanbater2 said:
What's the difference between physical voting and online voting? Don't the same risks apply to both?
Click to expand...
It's similar to the difference in risk of credit card fraud from today versus back in the day when they took a physical imprint of your card and everything was done with paper slips that were mailed into the bank. Sure, a waiter or someone at the processor could steal some cards. Now a couple of punks on the other side of the world can install some software into a major retailers or processors network and steal millions of cards before anyone wises up.

Voting is tricky because a proper system only lets registered voters vote a single time while ensuring their vote is counted without anyone knowing what that vote was. Some of the most brilliant people around have spent the last 30+ years designing systems to do so using mathematics to maintain those properties but the systems are mostly impractical.

Given how poorly made the machines to just collect votes in the current physical system are, the chance of a nightmare scenario where elections are undetectably rigged is very high.

Then again, it hardly seems to matter who gets elected.
 
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