Posted on 06/21/2012 4:23:13 PM PDT by ColdOne
Peter Orszag, former head of the Obama Office of Management and Budget, is desperate. With even Roll Call recognizing that President Obama is fighting an uphill battle for re-election, Orszag is floating a trial balloon: mandatory voting. His call for forced voting comes in an op/ed for Bloomberg News:
The U.S. prides itself as the beacon of democracy, but it’s very likely no U.S. president has ever been elected by a majority of American adults.
It’s our own fault -- because voter participation rates are running below 60 percent, a candidate would have to win 85 percent or more of the vote to be elected by a majority.
Compulsory voting, as exists in Australia and more than two dozen other countries, would fix that problem. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution argues, “Jury duty is mandatory; why not voting?”
During the 2008 election cycle, voter participation was approximately 64 percent; in 2004, it was about the same. Orszag wants that number up. Why?
Beyond simply raising participation, compulsory voting could alter the role of money in elections. Turn-out-the-vote efforts, often bankrolled by big-money groups, would become largely irrelevant. Negative advertising could be less effective, because a central aim of such ads is to discourage participation in the opponent’s camp.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
ROFLMBO!!
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had mandatory voting laws and it worked out great for him.
They better be careful what they wish for, it might just backfire on them.
Peter Orzag wrote a blurb for a book on healthcare that my organization just published.
later on in life i laughed remembering these stories- guess my dearly departed dad wasn’t far off....
My Dad and your Dad would have been friends.
This is a FANTASTIC idea if it has one slightly small tweak: Make it MANDATORY ALL Taxpayers vote. Optional... or even illegal, if not. Then it’s a DEAL!
Okay, Mr. Orzag, just for fun, please point to the part of the constitution that allows for mandatory voting.
Nationally, this would require a Constitutional Amendment. Though individual states could decide to to this.
Chances of this happening are between slim and none.
When voting ceases to be voluntary, it is no longer an exercise of choice but of coercion. The only rational choice in such a circumstance would be “none of the above”.
If there was mandatory voting and the first thing they did was clean the voter rolls, a democrat would never hold national office.
Republicans have 83 % of the counties in the US.
From the Times of Malta, 2/15/20009:
Countries and percentage turnout (last election)
Turkmenistan - 98.9
Rwanda - 96.5
Russia - 95.8
Australia - 95.1
Malta - 93.3
Burundi - 93.3
Greece - 93
Belarus - 92.9
Bahamas - 92
Anybody looking for evidence that a high percentage voter turnout leads to quality in a government or its elected officials is going to have a tough time making a case based on the list above.
I wonder if it’s occurred to Orzag exactly what mood the voters who hadn’t intended to go to the polls but were forced to by the incumbent’s administration would be in? Something tells me they wouldn’t exactly be supporters of Orzag’s favored politicians.
They already bus their voters, living and dead, to the polls and vote for them. What is the point of making it mandatory.
Really? I had no idea. So how does this work? Is there a name-to-vote tally, so that if you don't log a vote, there's an actual penalty involved? What does that mean for privacy of your vote? Any Australian FReepers out there who can shed some light on this?
Yes, but most of those counties are sparsely populated, while the beneficiary (non-taxpaying) class is vastly overrepresented in Democrat-dominated provinces. What we need to restore is the idea of voting as a vital privilege of citizenship and not an absolute right of those who happen to show up, and whose franchise derives not from a personal stake in self-governance but from a desire to obtain unearned benefits.
Oh, really. Remind me again how many times the commie usurper voted when he was a senator. I suppose some are more equal than others.
Sorry, Ann Althouse has this right the other day, we also have a right NOT to vote.
They’ll have us all marching in lockstep: first the exercise, then the voting, then the eating broccoli.
It is an indication of how exceedingly stupid they are that they still think, THEY STILL THINK, that ANY of this is a good idea.
So Obama is going to issue a Ukase (an edict by the Czar in Imperial Russia having the force of law) to mandate voting under penalty of say banishment to labor camps in Alaska?
This is interesting ColdOne, Thanks. Mandatory? These democRATs have a death wish of ever holding office again if everyone is made to vote. Wonder why democRATs no longer want to hold office? Would speculate though that would scare me.
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