We should provide incentives to voters
Re Should voting be mandatory? Opinion July 25 Peter MacLeod and Lyndsay Poaps have done an admirable job of describing the problem as regards the voting malaise that infects some of our population. Unfortunately they have not bothered to provide a solution. With that in mind let me offer one.
Since voting in a parliamentary democracy can be viewed as a right, a duty and/or a privilege, let us acknowledge that perhaps it should be all three. Let us educate our citizens that our forefathers won us the right to vote and that we should consider that our privilege to vote conveys upon us the duty to vote.
Now provide everyone a carrot to ensure that the vast majority of us do in fact cast a ballot. Provide a $100 tax refund for every such election in which we cast a ballot. Doing this will help persuade people to get out and vote.
Of course this will require one change to the ballots that we are given — a “none of the above” option must be provided so a voter can register their disapproval of the choices offered.
Modifying the way we elect our representatives could be a real plus in encouraging people to get out and vote. Let us consider the runoff system. It has advantages over the other systems.
The first is that in order to garner as many secondary votes as possible a candidate will have no choice but to offer positive reasons to select him or her over the other candidates. Just telling us how bad the opponents are will most likely be insufficient to get elected. It will also tend to discourage supporters of one candidate who has been badly knocked from casting a secondary ballot for the perpetrator. Hopefully this should cut down on the negative hyperbole we now endure. David Marks, Collingwood, Ont. Compulsory voting is often proposed by pundits as a solution to reverse falling turnout rates. Los Angeles and Philadelphia tried a different approach in 2015. Citizens who made the effort to cast a ballot would have a chance to win a lottery. In L.A., one random voter drew a $25,000 cash prize, as turnout for a school board election rose from 7 per cent to 10 per cent. One lucky Philadelphia voter was awarded a $10,000 cheque after turnout for the municipal election jumped from 20 per cent to 26 per cent.
Critics in both cities dismissed these pilot projects as gimmicks that used the personal greed of voters to fuel turnout increases. The creators of these experiments showed that lottery carrots can raise turnout numbers without the need of resorting to compulsory voting sticks. Luis Silva, Toronto