Justin wrote:
On 2004-09-06T06:22:29-0700, Sarad AV wrote:The difference being that in a system such as Sarad describes, if 'None of the above' gets more votes than any candidate, the election is declared void and a re-election is called (possibly excluding any of the candidates from the first round, depending on the details); hence, the 50% of the population who think 'they're all fvckers' have a reason to go to the polls.
the election commision of india had a proposal to the
govt. that the voter should be able to vote for 'none
of the above'. Though one can predict that such a
proposal will never be approved by the government, it
makes a lot of sense. Is any other democratic country
seriously thinking of implementing such an option?
If someone would vote for "none of the above" rather than write in his/her ideal candidate, that someone is a lazy oaf. Everyone who writes in a candidate is voting "none of the above."
The 50% of the U.S. population which doesn't vote is also voting "none
of the above" in a way. There's a difference in that some non-voters
may slightly prefer one candidate over another, but _assuming that
everyone has an ideal candidate_ they'd be willing to go to the polls
for, not voting is the same as saying all the candidates are
significantly less than the ideal.
I've experienced such a system in action (within a student body) and it works well, provided you like your democracy to be loud and participatory. For this reason it's unlikely to be implemented by an incumbent government, though I guess it's possible an uber-populist like Chavez or Lula might consider it.
W
