This law will establish a voter reward random drawing every two years with a first prize of one million dollars or more. The purpose is to increace voter participation. Voters who cast ballots in primary or general elections will be eligible to win. The money will come from the Arizona Lottery and private donations.Now there are a few issues that can be brought up here. First of all is whether or not this will be an effective incentive to cause people to come out to the pulls. There's some thought that this could actually be a disincentive. Presumibly the people who currently go to the polls are doing so in order to fulfill their civic duty, but putting a pricetag incentive on voting (and a rather small pricetag when you really consider your chances of actually winning) you are essentially eliminating that civic duty incentive. It basically cheapens voting and may cause those who go to the polls as their civic duty to cease doing so, thus further lowering voter turnout. On the other hand, millions of people go out and play the lottery every weekend. If you figured out the expected value of your chance to win the lottery it is FAR less than the amount you pay for the ticket (Expected value = chance of winning X amount of winnings). So I think this initiative will cause more people to vote.
Although this brings up another question, do we want them too? Sure having a larger percentage of people vote legitimizes the democracy and presumably strengthens the state, but do we really want people to be voting because they have a shot at a million dollars. Then there's the other part of it, we may still be losing a number of people who are doing so for their civic duty. They may not value the "payoff" at all and feel that it cheapens what they would otherwise take pride in doing. So our net result may be that we are bringing in a bunch of mindless fools and alienating those who actually care about the state of things. Then again we already have fanatics that continuously skew our polls and possibly distorting the true view of america so that politicians sometimes play to the nutjob vote rather than what is truly good for the country. A big fear is that bringing in all these people who never cared to vote before may make our government weaker than stronger. If they had never cared to go out and vote before, it's highly doubtful that they'd be willing to educate themselves on the issues or the candidates to vote, they're just going to put in their ballot so that they can get entered into the lottery. Thus, all of the bullshit slandering and image making that goes on in politics today would likely be worse and the election campaigns would become even more of a circus with the dignity of a Hanes commercial.
Wait til we get our Hanes on you
1 comment:
i dont think there will be a disincentive to those who view it as their civic duty because voting still will be, but now they will get the added advantage of possibly winning 1 million dollars.
the problem i do have is taht it will encourage many uneducated people to cast votes. voting is a right that requires circumspection, research and understanding of the issues. as opposed to the "is this guy someone i could drink beer with standard?"
frankly, my opinion is that no one stupid should vote.
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