There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for.
A right to vote includes the right to not vote.
It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.
They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.
Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience.
Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.
No election can mitigate this so long as your vote is provable to a third party.
An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.
The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).
Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.
The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.
If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA
I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.
Maybe the framers can go fuck themselves.
Yet the framers quite literally told you to change what they made, so they agree.
In Argentina, elections are held on Sundays.
Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
> We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male.
> Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
> Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance.
> But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon.
> But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for?
When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?
There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?
They are weighted - the House is allocated by population, and the Senate by state.
I prefer not to live in the Hunger Games world, personally.
Those books are a brilliant exploration of the tyranny of urban clusters.
The electoral college is an effective foil to that.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/18/politics/patriot-games-an...
About half of all folks in US prisons are there for non-violent crimes, and we're talking about a relatively small percentage of voters anyway. Maybe ~3 million added to the ~244 million eligible voters
No longer being able to vote seems like a rather petty inconvenience to heap on top
There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no.
>I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal.
Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.)
>We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.
> Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here.
> > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
> We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter.
> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.
This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly).
So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places).
So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election.
>We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix.
>A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too.
More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?
