12th November 2019
Have you ever thought about your voting strategy? How should we think about how we vote other than for the party we support? I had not appreciated that people do different things at the ballot box not just to cast a vote but to thwart certain outcomes by playing game theory.
At the higher level, should voting be mandatory? Do we have a moral duty to vote? Is abstaining or spoiling your ballot paper a legitimate course of action? It frustrates me that a big percentage of our population don’t vote and that there is so much apathy towards our politicians. We should take an interest in how our country is run and the courses of action we take but there again should you force people to be interested. I have sympathy for the Australian mandatory voting approach but my concern is that even under that system people would vote without any consideration of the issues. A more troubling thought is that either with fake news or lack of understanding /intelligence that we couldn’t make informed decisions anyway so being forced to vote would be a nonsense.
The Romans had a system called Epistocracy where only the informed were allowed to vote. That creates a two tier society but maybe that is more honest and perhaps only the interested or those who make an effort to inform themselves would vote.
I heard an American on the radio talk about how he voted and he said he did it on the basis of foreign policy. Partly this was his area of expertise but interestingly he believed that if the US had a more outward facing, inclusive, co-operative foreign policy then this would benefit the internal dynamics of how the country was run. I have never explicitly ranked what is important to me in an election decision. I suppose we all do it mostly on what will impact us rather than any grand societal changes and so I quite admire that he was looking at the bigger well being of the country first for his voting intentions.
Curiosity and the rascal 