The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it’s the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it’s the fools that form the overwhelming majority.

-An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

Like you, Paul, I have spent Thursday evenings desperately trying to get every last person down to the polling station. I am fairly sure why some people have cast their ballots in a particular way; because they received a knock on the door at half past eight on polling day from someone wearing a coloured rosette who spoke to them for five minutes and said something to the effect of even if you don’t like one particular party, it’s important to vote because of all the sacrifices made for democracy all the people and so on, and they vote for the colour of the rosette.

If we had lots of people who weren’t aligned to a particular party, but made a sober consideration of the issues, the policies and the candidates, and made their vote on that basis, Paul might have a point. What we actually have are people who are swayed by base emotion; because the leader of a party made a gaffe, or they only care about the Grangemouth Swamp Rats, or because they saw a poster.

What is the result? Half-baked policies shouted from the front pages of the tabloids that are quietly forgotten two weeks later, just to give the appearance of politics and policy. Unless they spend an amount of time reading newspapers and sitting in party meetings that for any other activity would be considered a sign of mental illness, voters cannot make a decision on the big issues because there is no easily accessible, calm, sober information or opinion on which to make a decision.

What is the cause? The self-same half baked policies, the incestuous relationship between politics & media and the revolving door between media and lobbying. It’s hard to get people to vote, and you don’t have time, resources or people enough to have a serious conversation with the electorate.

We then have three types of voter; those who will definitely turn out (most of whom will definitely turn out for their coloured rosette of choice), those who definitely will not turn out and those who might turn out, given a prod. How are they prodded? By screaming, stupid headlines. That puts people off, but you cannot pull out of the arms race because you will not get as many votes as the other side.

All the talk of encouraging people to vote is all carrot, no stick.

So here’s an alternative. Each MP should cast one hundred votes in Parliament – if one hundred per cent of that MPs constituents turned out to vote. If only half did, they only receive fifty votes, and so on. It doesn’t matter whether the votes were for the person who won, or even if they were spoiled, but they must have gone out to vote. No-one is forced to vote, but if they don’t, their area loses say in Parliament. The same for other elections, mutatis mutandis. That suddenly changes the rational-voter calculation dramatically in favour of voting.

The calculation also changes for parties. A lot more people are going to vote. You can’t win the election by nudging the few people in marginal seats who make the difference; you have to engage, hopefully, in a broader, calmer debate.

If they still can’t be bothered to vote, let them have less representation, too.

I read the first couple of paragraphs and presumed this post was an expansion of the conversation on Twitter. For those passing through, we were talking about ‘… if voting should be made harder to do in order to improve democracy.’

Feel free to move it to the new post if you want.

I think you’ve responded to my provocations on Twitter rather than the actual post. I’m arguing that ‘light preferences’ are *more important* than heavy ones. It’s just that – when we argue that people should be encouraged to get involved in making decisions in individual issues, the net effect is that you objectively become an advocate of the postition that I’ve headed the post up with.

(As an aside I have a habit of inflicting exactly what you propose on various friends, “If you didn’t make the effort to go to the polling station, don’t try to lecture me on politics”. But that’s a personal failing.)

Most people take the path of least resistance. Give them the choice of getting something in return for not voting, especially where that thing is a lot easier than marking a ballot paper, and they’ll likely go for it. What needs to be done is to make them realise how important their vote is. The most extreme way is to place them in a dictatorship for a while. Once they’ve had that experience they’ll want to get out on a dark and rainy evening to put forward their opinion.

As you point out the dumbing down of policies is never a good thing; just look at what BBC Question Time has become and where televised debates are taking us. Still, as any advertising executive will tell you, there’s a difference between selling to the lowest common denominator and approaching a topic in a way that gets people to buy into it. The media achieves this with attention grabbing headlines such as, ‘every park is full of dogs that are trained to kill you as soon as scratch their own ear’ but fails to offer a balanced point of view. How about an independent source of information that can make people sit up and listen without spinning things one way or another? Make people want to vote and make that voting easy, rather than give them an excuse to avoid their obligation. It may feel like dog whistling, or genetically targeted drugs, but when life is this comfortable people need to be stirred up.