Forcing people to vote doesn't solve these problems, it just forces people to make a decision when they would admit they don't have enough information to make the decision that truly reflects their preferences.

Placing constitutional limitations on the power of government might be a better solution. "No subsidies for anyone" seems more stable than arguing over each specific subsidy.

See my comment re: the Tea Party to Drethelin below - I think extremism is a far stronger motivator to vote than intelligence. Note that Konkvistador doesn't appear to be voting, and for him to be on this board in the first place is a strong endorsement of his intelligence. I definitely agree about compulsory political study though. Also compulsory epistemology, ethics and statistics, etc.

My individual vote is unlikely to make a difference. But it's pretty easy to define relatively small voting blocs (i.e. farmers in Kansas) that would alter the results of elections if their voting behavior radically changed. If I really do have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace, there are things I should do, right? Even if my mechanical hardware imposes limits on how ideal my decisionmaking is.

Of course, none of that applies if one does not have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace.

I must have missed the software update when we implemented TDT on voter brains.

I think you're having it the other way around -- TDT is partially based on the idea that "when you decide, you aren't deciding just for yourself", it's not the idea which requires TDT...

In this case, you're not voting just for yourself, you're voting for all the people who'd vote the same party as you for roughly the same reasons. And if you don't vote, you're not voting for all the people who likewise don't bother to vote for roughly the same reasons as you...

Oh hey, I drafted a reply to this comment and then accidentally ctrl+w'd the tab before I hit the button. Whoops! Damn, it was a long one too and not I have to retype it...

I try not to be hypocrite as much as possible. If I say voting is a bad idea, I hope most people who know me will agree this is a good indication that I don't vote either. Also unlike with voting, I actually think I could perhaps change peoples minds, I view it as sanity training. More sane people is a good thing since they have positive externalities.

I wasn't trying to convince you to keep arguing against voting but vote in secret, I was presenting an argument that voting was actually a good idea and that you should advocate it. I also wasn't trying to antagonise you or anything like that, just trying to inject a little humour into the debate. Which is not to say that I think I DID antagonise you, but until someone invents a keyboard that can convey the emotional content of a sentence I'm going to err on the side of caution.

I'm not saying that democracy is the best way of doing things, but if some countries ARE democracies then we should at least try to do mitigate the negative effects of the system.

Democracies in say Western Europe actually only work as well as they do because of the competent civil service and respect people have for experts, which de facto radically limits how much politicians can do, especially since the process needed for them to fire any of these people is usually not worth the effort if it is possible at all. How would your relationship with your boss change if he couldn't fire you?

I'm not sure if this was a rebuttal? I mean, no matter why democracies in Western Europe are working well, surely this doesn't change the fact that we should mitigate the negative qualities of a democracy? I actually thought I'd be on firm ground with you here, since you're advocating a change away from democracy and I'm arguing that while we still have democracy we should try to make sure it doesn't cause too much havoc. AFAIK most Western European democracies don't have compulsory voting, if that's what you were getting at. Forgive me if I am missing the point here.

It is a ritual that contributes to belief. Why do you think Islam has obligatory praying several times a day?

I would agree with this point if I thought the effect was significant, but I think that having to vote once a year reduces this effect to complete negligibility.

It is a waste of time. A small but obvious one. Like buying lottery tickets is a small but obvious waste of money.

Sure, but that only matters if you weren't going to waste the time anyway. I mean, if you were going to lose that money down the back of the couch anyway you might as well blow it on lottery tickets. I'm not saying it's a good idea to waste resources, definitely not, but even the most organised, motivated person has one hour free a year in which they could vote without sacrificing some other important activity. If you genuinely do not have an hour free then you're the sort of person I want voting, and I respectfully request that you delegate an hour's worth of work to me so that you can go vote. EDIT: And of course I don't actually agree that it's a complete waste of time - I think it produces marginal benefit or I'd be agreeing with you.

Large voter participation legitimize government action that in fact has very little to do with the political process.

I'm not sure which government action you're talking about here, but government action doesn't need legitimising, it's legitimised in almost everyone's eyes. Conversely, not voting in a system where it isn't compulsory to vote doesn't delegitimise the government. If anything, you should want voting to be compulsory so you can flout the rules to draw attention to the fact that democracy is a bad way of doing things. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but non-compulsory voting isn't actually a step away from democracy, it's just a step into a different type of democracy. Swapping to non-compulsory voting doesn't make it any more likely that a country will abandon democracy altogether.

I don't need to argue with friends and family because I wouldn't vote for their candidate.

I think this was probably a bit facetious, since it's relatively small-scale compared to your other arguments, but on the chance it wasn't... Arguing with your friends and family about political allegiances is actually a big point in favour of compulsory voting if you ask me - it forces people to think about politics. If my brother has always voted to support Americans Against Contraception (or whatever), then of his friends who vote, most of them probably share his political views. But if everyone has to vote, he'll start meeting people who vote the other way. The more arguments he starts with sane people, the more likely they are to convert him.

I agree that that is a downside of compulsory voting, but at the moment my strong suspicion is that it's offset by the dilution of the crazies - see my reply to Drethelin above re: the Tea Party.

Note also that LWers are not necessarily the demographic that I associate most strongly with, and in fact that I don't associate with any rigidly defined demographic at all. There are definitely people out there who think like me, though, and if we vote as a bloc then we have more power than just me alone. This is why people underestimate their own voting power, and this is why people who care at all about not being lead by lunatics should vote.

I think the majority of people who don't vote out of laziness are neither extremely smart nor extremely stupid, neither extremely right-wing nor extremely leftist, neither extremely gay nor extremely straight, etc. That's the point, they're not extremists.

I know that the lazy moderates aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, but I also know that once they're out of the picture there's much less ballast to keep the radical lunatics in line. To use a specific example: I think that the Tea Party does a better job of convincing their lazy supporters to vote than either of the major parties do, and if we accept that logic then the inescapable conclusion is that the Tea Party's influence is being inflated by America's non-compulsory voting system.

It's not just the dullards who aren't voting, either. I think you would be shocked at how smart and well informed you have to be before you actually decide you care enough to vote. Just look at Konkvistador - surely LWians and their ilk are the people we want MOST to vote?

By voting, you will not make (or probably even encourage) every jaded rationalist in America to vote, so from a decision theoretical standpoint that observation is irrelevant.

That's not quite what I meant. If people think similarly to you, then they will most likely make similar decisions as you. Now that I've suggested this to you, you think similarly to all the people out there who realised this themselves or had someone point it out to them. So when you decide whether or not to vote, you should do so in the knowledge that there are a bunch of people out there who will probably end up making the same decision as you purely because they think similarly to you. You're not just deciding for yourself, you're deciding for everyone who thinks like you.

EDIT: Also, I disagree with you about the negative effects of compulsory voting. There are definitely some, but I think the negative effects of NON-compulsory voting are potentially worse. See my comment to Drethelin below.