You legitimately don't see any problem with this?

There's a huge swath of people who are unemployed, disabled, or otherwise unable to work. There's people with criminal records who effectively are barred from most jobs. There's entire towns where the factory that employed most of the people went out of business and now everyone is unemployed, unless they move- which they can't because their homes are now worthless and they have mortgages.

You're talking about taking away the voting rights of all of those people because they're too poor for you. Bad luck on their part, not being born to privilege.

And of course you don't even see where this goes next. Once you start to take away the voting rights of such people, they have no ability to fight as you keep going, as you take more away from them. They have no votes, no voice, no ability to stop those with power.

I cannot imagine a more sociopathic, heartless idea than the one you've just proposed.

Makes sense to me, especially if you are paying local income taxes in that area. I seem to recall from high school that 'taxation without representation' caused a big kerfluffle a couple hundred years ago.

Forcing people to vote is a seriously bad idea. They have no reason to vote responsibly, and likely will vote maliciously, carelessly, or randomly.

Having the right to vote includes the right to choose not to vote.

I think it would be fair to be able to opt out of tax filing obligations in the US and for that give up the right to vote until you return.

Apathy and laziness. Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do a lot to solve that.

>It feels like totalitarianism to me.

I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not even remotely close to totalitarianism. There are tons of things citizens are forced to do, file taxes, sign up for selective service, serve on a jury which costs jurors money if they are chosen, etc. Forcing people to go to a voting place once every 4 years is pretty light comparatively.

>What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate?

What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your ballet if you don't want to vote.

>Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.

That I heartily agree with. I personally don't vote because I live in Illinois so my vote means nothing. That's a serious problem caused by a horribly inefficient and outdated system. Right now a vast majority of Americans have no power in elections, it always comes down to a very small number of swing states, usually less than 15. Live in 70% of the states? Well tough shit, what you want doesn't matter at all. That imo is the fundamental problem. I think if we switch from possibly the worst voting method to just a straight democratic vote, ignoring all the superior voting methods just sticking with FPTP, we would see much greater turnout.

Would that even be desirable? I feel that serving the desires of the voters is an essential (and desirable) property of democracy.

Could you clarify? It's somewhat shocking to hear the Vote.org representative say voting is not a right in the U.S.

This is true, but a less cynical read would be that this was a side-effect, and what they were aiming for was reserving the act of voting for only those who were informed, educated, etc. Land ownership was a rough proxy for that.

I’m not so sure it’s a bad idea to restrict voting, but the problem is, no one wants to be the one left out, and someone will always be disenfranchised.

Why not? Why isn't it a good idea to ask that folks have "skin in the game" via a poll tax if they want to participate in the political process?

Terrible, terrible idea. This is how people are discriminated against. Prevent enough people that don't agree with your politics from getting a job, they can no longer vote, and you can screw them.

Are you advocating for universal universal suffrage?

As in, everyone can vote everywhere?

No. But even if it was... your point is?

> At this point if you think voting is going to turn this around

Indeed I do. Republicans want small government (read: no regulation) and support conservatism (read: maintain status quo & low tolerance for others), while other parties are progressive (read: open to changes) and liberal (read: tolerant). Republicans in power are massively over-represented and have been for more than 20 years in the minority, and yet, they are stifling the majority while holding them hostage with illegal acts, such as fraud, efforts to prevent Blacks from voting, gerrymandering, or refusing to execute their sworn duties as elected representatives.

Residents of D.C. and Puerto Rico, US citizens, are being taxed without representation. Clearly this is unethical. If only they could exercise their right to vote, we wouldn't be having this problem. Or if some Californians moved into Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, again, the crushing yoke of Republican tyranny could be cast off, and the US would begin to operate as intended, i.e. as a republic.

How do we ensure non-citizens aren’t voting? We accept many visitors - refugees, H1B, tourists, F1/I-20, etc. None are granted voting rights.

Your rights can only be secured if the Government can pay for them.

Then the richest 49% will need to decide if the society they live in is worth that, or if they want to leave or otherwise separate.

> Our current politics isn’t even representative of what people want, it is a mind control contest. Whoever can manipulate the population the best wins.

I agree with that, but the solution is not to strip people of rights out of the assumption you know who knows best - that's the playbook of a substantial proportion of brutally oppressive, authoritarian movements who started with a notion of wanting what was "best" only to find out the people they claimed to want the best for had their own ideas of what that meant.

> The whole concept of universal suffrage was probably silly to begin with. There should be a buy-in. If you can’t even pull your life together, why should you be empowered to influence how I live mine?

The whole concept of universal suffrage is based on the concept that if you're not willing to give me a say, you have no legitimacy for demanding any say over my life whatsoever, and so can expect to face years or decades of resistance - however long it takes until you lose. No government will in the long run survive ongoing disenfranchisement, because a proportion of those you oppress will always be prepared to fight for freedom.

> What if I changed my suggestion to only people who pay net taxes get to vote. This would disqualify people living on social security so the comment I was replying to would get their wish.

Property requirement by proxy. Time for an armed revolution.

> Also, why is is somehow less radical to want to disenfranchise the elderly?

It's only marginally so as long as the proposal you replied to was vague on the extent of it, proposing to weight the value of the vote somehow based on the time they'd have to live with the consequences. That could be taken to outright disenfranchise the oldest, or slightly skewing it. Had they come out with something firmer, and you hadn't proposed something very direct with clear parallels to past real-life disenfranchisement they might have been the focus of the same level of opposition instead of you.

To be very clear, I think any disenfranchisement is unjustified. As it is, the US, and the UK where I live, can hardly be considered democracies given their horrible electoral systems have a similar effect for anyone who disagrees with the main options, but at least they don't go so far as to openly deprive any significant competent population group the vote (though I do consider the disenfranchisement of portions of convicted felons to be blatantly undemocratic and unjustified as well).

Yes, absolutely. I have zero confidence that today we'd have public education, social security, or freedom from religion. I'd be terrified if we had to relitigate the Bill of Rights

>In any case, it seems plainly ridiculous on its face that I am to be bound by laws I had no part in voting for.

And then the next step is going to be "well I didn't vote for these laws, why does everyone else get to tell me what to do" and we're in sovereign citizen bullshit territory

>I am taxed without representation.

No, you are not. If you're a citizen in the US and not a felon, you have just as much opportunity to vote for your representatives as anyone else. In fact, you have more direct ability to vote for your representation than the founders of the country did since we've....changed the method of election over the course of the past 200-odd years

You simply don't like that most people are content with the system we have. I doubt you'd be happy with the system that would get put in place if we did start over every 70 years so none of this matters anyway

How is that even a problem if the financial penalty for not voting is implemented by way of a per-election tax credit for voting?

> How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate

A large minority of voters do that in the best case now. I'm not really convinced that anger at being offered a financial incentive to turn in a ballot is going to motivate people to be more effective wat voting for bad candidates than those who are ideologically motivated that way now.

It's what we already have, just extended a little. We already limit voting to citizens, and we have mandatory education for age groups and as a prerequisite to do certain professions.

> I certainly don't want any government to have the power to re-educate adults and limit who can vote because they're voting wrong. That's Orwellian.

Look at the situation we are in now, though. We have an extremely ignorant, outright science denying, not insignificant subset of the population, who due to our system of government can elect in people who share their beliefs, who then go on to be in real positions of power.

What do you do when you have a slight majority of Trumps or MTGs as your representatives? More than likely, freedoms will erode and wars would likely increase.

So, how can you avoid that, or worse problems caused by an ignorant voting block? If you want to keep this form of government (which I would argue we should not), I'm not sure what other solutions there are other than to have some sort of test for voting. Maybe moving the definition of what constitutes a citizen like in Starship Troopers could work.

Completely on point. Especially true of the American public.

Getting people to migrate to this scheme is a huge problem. Today in America, voting is a right. However, to many, it appears to be a financially free activity as well. Or some may tie it in with "you get to vote if you pay taxes". Regardless, this "pay into a fund in order to vote" won't really go well -- we already pay a fund (taxes), and it's distribution is mishandled / non-optimally allocated / gamed by people in the system.