you show up, take your ballot which registers a receipt, and abstain on that particular office/issue. but at least showing up to register your abstention IS your vote.
Really wish the definition of democracy included by default the right to vote that you object strongly enough to significant options not to vote for any of them.
> Really wish the definition of democracy included by default the right to vote that you object strongly enough to significant options not to vote for any of them.
It does. Even with places with mandatory voting, you usually are only required to turn in a ballot paper, it can still not actually vote for any of the options.
Of course, that's just ceding your involvement in the choice (as it should be -- you are, in effect, voting no preference between the available options.)
Yes, it's true everyone dies, but we're not talking about death and it's obvious that it's possible to have a voting system that's able to tell the difference between indifference, objection, and support of the potential candidates/parties in a general election.
With most voting systems if a single person votes, it's a valid election. If the majority decent, it's still a valid election.
It should be that if the majority decent, the election is nullified - otherwise it's a recipe for a toxic political environment.
"equally unacceptable" is not what "no preference" means. i'm astonished you're trying to argue these are equivalent.
"differently unacceptable" is also a terrible situation though! this is the entire point of my argument. I may find some candidates more bad than others. being forced to vote for less bad is still being disenfranchised to a significant extent.
No, having the opportunity to vote for less bad is being enfranchised. The franchise is an entitlement for to have an option you like provided for you by someone else, not is it an entitlement to have your most preferred option be successful through the filtering that happens in the political process you are entitled to participate in before the stage of a general election ballot is reached.
FPTP is a bad system of aggregating preferences where there are more than two options in principle, and produces bad effects in the filtering (and voting) process because people adjust for the bad way that it aggregates preferences. And there are lots of sensible, obvious, and proven ways to make that better. But none of them guarantee you a situation where you aren't forced either to not vote it to vote for a less-bad alternative (though ranked ballots methods move some of the filtering process into the general election, down-ballot votes are still votes.)
the voting franchise is a fundamental right of citizens in a democracy. the fact that you're referring to it as an entitlement is misinformed, and in fact, quite warped and reveals a deep misunderstanding of our form of government.
the state we find ourselves in this year is abundant evidence of the terrible malfunctioning of the American political process. the system we have in place now struggles to reach even the basic requirements of legitimacy and consent of the governed.
what does popular sovereignty mean anyway if large majorities of the populous are very very very unhappy with their government?
No Confidence is a term of art for a vote against the government in power (usually, specifically in the content of a parliamentary system, in a vote by parliament, though arguably a public recall vote of the head of government in a non-parliamentary system is a fairly direct analog, and any vote against an incumbent in any system is a loose analog, as are mechanisms that aren't formally votes of No Confidence of removal-of-existing-incumbents-by-legislative action.)
You (or your MP or other legislative representative) can usually do some or all of these things in most systems that are recognized as democracies.
What you seem to want is something different, the option to vote for No Representative in a regular election and cause the office to be vacant when the next term would start (whether this actually leaves the office vacant or triggers the usual succession mechanism that would apply if it had been filled and then became vacant through death, resignation, etc. is unclear.) This, I can't see a coherent argument for.
yes, understood that No Confidence has historically referred to a parliamentary procedure.
I think the term is appropriate here as well but might be problematic because of its historical usage. Avoiding confusion or conflation is a good thing, so maybe a different term should be used for this situation.
I think your suggestion of No Representation is a decent one. I'm not suggesting that that should result in an unfilled office though. My view is that if No Representation actually wins (takes the plurality of the vote), it should trigger a special election where new candidates must be nominated and a new popular vote must be held.
> I'm not suggesting that that should result in an unfilled office though.
I don't think anything else is even remotely reasonable, in the end.
> My view is that if No Representation actually wins (takes the plurality of the vote), it should trigger a special election where new candidates must be nominated and a new popular vote must be held.
A special election is a not-uncommon vacancy-filling mechanism, but I think you are still going to have to accept vacancies caused by a No Representative win if you want the option at all: by design, elections are usually proximate in time to the end of the term -- the two month time between US federal general elections and the start of Congressional terms is about the length usually specified for a special election, leaving no time to actually tabulate and certify election results before the next term would start, and even if you can squeeze in one special election between the regular election and the start of the term, what happens if you get a No Representative win in the second election? Or does the supposed "democratic right" to vote against all candidates only apply once per cycle (and if it does, why do you think you'll get more acceptable candidates in the second try)?
I have most frequently seen this option called "None of the Above". A special election consisting of all new candidates seems like the best practice for when NOTA wins an election.
in UK Parliament a vote of no confidence (which is cast by MPs rather than popular vote, but still, a possible example), leads to the current parliament being dissolved and a new general election being scheduled for the near future. Canadian parliament is similar. In the German government an analogous procedure exists, except the general election is not an obligatory outcome.
in these parliamentary systems its a way to avoid total deadlock where the executive and legislature cannot come to terms. this is obviously a problem we suffer from acutely in the U.S. right now. however, that's a somewhat different scenario than what we're discussing here specifically, where the no confidence vote would come directly from the popular vote instead of as a parliamentary procedure.
In the context of a popular general election, this would be similar to failure to form a quorum, meaning no participant in the election can be considered to have a mandate or consent of the governed.
what would it mean for this outcome to "win" the election? Clearly that the procedures that nominated candidates for office had malfunctioned and that none of the nominated candidates are satisfactory to a sufficient slice of the electorate. This would be a protection against a form of oligarchy or minority rule. I think the reasons for considering this are abundantly clear in the U.S. in 2016.
what should happen as a result of a general no confidence result? my suggestion would be a special election where the candidates of the previous election are barred from being re-nominated. if the special election also failed to select a candidate with a mandate to govern then it should automatically trigger a constitutional convention, since that would represent a PROFOUND failure to represent the people and would need to be resolved by extraordinary means.
Also, places like Australia that have compulsory voting do not check that you have marked the ballot in any fashion, only signed in, taken a ballot, and put it in the box.
