It's Democracy, Stupid!

One of the tenets of Dave's Tao is, "When considering a choice between one thing or another, consider also both or neither."

Last I heard, democracy is about choice.  One goes to the polls and chooses between one candidate or another.  Or, one may choose not to go to the polls at all.  It is a sad documentary on our citizenry that fewer than 60 per cent actually exercise their vote in presidential elections.  In local elections the figure is probably closer to 30 per cent.  Still, that's the nature of democracy.

Democracy : choice.  Get the concept.

Peter Orszag is vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup Inc and a former director of the OMB for the present administration.  One does not rise to a top-tier position with an international corporation without high-powered smarts.  A high-level position in the Obama Administration, well, not so much.  After all, look at Joe Biden.

Still, Orszag doesn't get it, this whole democracy thing.  In an op-ed piece published in the June 21 issue of the Tampa Bay Times, he argues for compulsory voting.

"The probability that any individual voter can alter the outcome of an election is effectively zero," he writes.  "So if voting imposes any cost, in terms of time or hassle, a perfectly rational person would conclude it's not worth doing.  The problem is that if each person were to reach such a rational conclusion no one would vote, and the system would collapse.  Mandatory voting solves that collective problem by requiring people to vote and punishing nonvoters with a fine."

Mandatory democracy?  How oxymoronic!  Moreover, does Orszag imply that democracy is irrational?

I'm not going to reproduce his whole thesis.  Google Peter Orszag and I'm sure it'll crop under one menu option or another.  More interesting to me is visualizing possible scenarios for enforcing such a requirement.

First thing we're going to need is a cabinet-level Department of Voter Enforcement, with an attending bureaucracy of regional, state and local offices.  Thousands of officers will have to be hired to roust those of voting age ffrom their residences and get them to the nearest polling place.  Courts will have to be established to adjudicate recalcitrant folks who just won't get with the program.

Next, we'll have to root these people out.  We'll have to bang on cardboard boxes in back alleys and under overpasses.  We'll have to raid NASCAR and WWE venues.  We'll either have to set up polling facilities in the nation's slams, or transport prisoners en masse to community polling locations.

A requirement of a poli sci course on political parties that I completed had me going to a number of houses to interview people whose names were provided me from a voter registration list.  I was to ask each a series of questions, one of which was for whom the voter was going to vote.

"Whichever one is the Democrat," was one answer.

"Why the Democrat?" I asked.

"'Cause my diddy and grandiddy were Democrats, so I am, too."

Another interviewee also responded Democrat, because that's what his boss was.

Mandatory voting will cost millions to administer and enforce, and for what?  So we can say that at last we have a president elected by a majority of citizens, not just a majority of voters?

Quantity < quality.  Get the concept.