I favor turning the "private ballot" for president and issues into a "public ballot". Your vote will be tied to a unique reciept you get as you vote and a publically printed list which gives your name, address attached to your vote. Why? It will eliminate fraud to it's absolute minimum and a vote effects the public (people), so it should not be private. Private influence is for your closet, not the streets and policies of America. Debate and dispute it's unflawed ability to express real democratic vote, but please, I really want you to vote on it. Look above this thread opener! Cast your vote as if it were a real national issue decided here on Sciforums.
I can't vote; it's a tie for me. Public voting would stop fraud but private voting stops coercion. For a mild mannered nation fraud would be the bigger problem but historically coercion is the larger problem. I have become disillusioned with mass voting all together. Each subsection of the population needs to be represented but individuals should not be voting if they refuse to be informed. To be semi-informed would require spending three hours a day or more with high quality information sources. This is too much to ask for and is inefficient. We should have a random lottery by which we choose voters from the general population. We should only have as many voters as we need to be a statistically valid sample of the population. A randomly selected 2,800 Americans could accurately represent the 280,000,000 Americans. We could pay them something for spending three hours a day on studying policy options and politicians. If each American paid $0.33 a year to the voters then the 2,800 voters could recieve $30 an hour, 3 hours a day, 365 days a year. We would get better government that would save us much more than $.33 per person per year in taxes. It would be much easier to monitor for fraud if you only had to monitor 2,800 voters.
Public voting would allow something nasty to happen. Lets say here in the United States when Bush was reelected we have public polls. Some nuts take it upon themselves to start finding and killing random individuals who voted for Bush to terrorize the masses. In the same way, a candidate could win an election through what amounts to threats and kneecap breaking.
The important thing is to understand the significant relation between the two things you distinguished: fraud and coersion. The public vote is meant to diminish fraud. Yes, coercion is an issue, but not significantly related, so a public vote wouldn't be directly effected. The aim is to first know your vote actually is counted. First things first. Coercion is a relevant issue and naturally is the second thing to take to task. To confuse one and the other, allows no progress with either. There are seperate solutions for both problems vs. one solution for both. You pointed toward the solution of handling the coercion element in your comment. (By the way, exelent comment). A fundamental approach to diminish coersion is to take power away from the ignorant and easily coersed, by giving informedness a greater degree of influence in vote. It is less likely that the informed will be coerced to use their influence to degrade themselves by making a intentionally inferior decision. It is much more likely the uninformed and ignorant will unintentionally be coerced to make inferior decisions. Everyone should be able to vote. Although, your level of informedness should be directly proportionate to your voting influence. The way you do this is to administer a test of knowledge on any given issue or candidate and set the voting influence rating based upon that. "A public test" according to the phislophy above will secure fraud protection and the internet will make this very, very efficient and inexpensive to implement. Of course voters could not be an expert on every issue. They'd pick a few, study, take the test to set their influence and vote. If they vote on other issues, they'd have the default influence, where no test is taken on the issue or candidate. Yes, this does create a level of bureaucracy, but it would pay off, beacause the level of intelligence on changes in government would be directly proportionate to the increase in intelligent influence.
That's ludicrous. Have you ever seen bumper stickers or a political signs on residence lawns? That's enough evidence for the so-called nutcases to terrorize these individuals. But, it's not happening. Your argument very, very weak. No, I change my mind with a little thought. That is not an argument.
By public voting I assume you mean that everyone gets to see how everybody else voted and therefore any group can double-check the vote count. I don't know how Saddam's elections worked, but every ruthless dictator could be sure of reelection with either a public vote after which those who vote "incorrectly" will be killed or a private vote in which all "incorrect" ballots are thrown out and replaced with correct ballots. There is a problem with favoring the informed. Everybody lies to themselves. Think of arguments between husbands and wives; most of the time one or both of the spouses have fooled themselves. The uniformed also are humans that suffer and feel joy; they must be represented and protected. The wealthy tend to understand economics better than the poor do but the wealthy tend to delude and flatter themself into believing that they contribute more to the economy than they really do and they tend to under value the contributions of poor people forcing themselves to get up every day and function as reliable, hard working, unrespected, bored robots all day long, day after day. Even if the smart wealthy informed people have self sacrificing compassion and good intentions towards all fellow citizens, they will not be able to stop deluding themselves and therefore the less informed poor people must represent themself rather than rely on better informed people to look out for their interests.
You are applying the vote to Iraq. That is a different issue. I'm not talking about Iraq. I'm talking about America. Although, it could work there too, that's off topic. It can work in America. Yes, people do lie to themselves. But, if you consider everyone, they do not lie most of the times to themselves. They are straight with themselves most of the time. Give humans some respect, by being accurate. We're damn good creatures and honest too, most of the time. Which means the informed will make it better with more influence.
You are way off base here. Could Michael Moore's cameraman cast a vote for Bush and feel his job is secure? Could a closet homosexual vote for gay rights in a conservative community without "outing" himself? Could conservative actors get work with their voting records out there for anyone to see? A private ballot is the only truly free ballot. Still, much more needs to be done to ensure the integrity of our elections.
