Last Updated on: 10th November 2013, 12:06 pm
Update: Snazzy new poll no longer exists. It died along with the old Echo comment system.
I’m not sure how I feel about this idea. I’d love it if everybody voted, but forcing people to exercise their rights in a free country kind of flies in the face of the whole free country thing. But on the other hand, do we really live in a free country to begin with? The very fact that we have laws to tell us what we absolutely can and cannot do suggests that we don’t, and when so much of the content of those laws is influenced by special interest groups and rich corporate lobbyists, it sometimes doesn’t seem like we live in much of a democratic one either.
And how mandatory is something that you can get out of simply by sending $20 to the government? Actually, now that I think about it, the way Canadians react to giving money to the government, I’d expect 98% voter turnout at every election for the rest of time.
So what do you think? Let us know in our snazzy new mandatory poll…If it’s working for you. If you can’t see the poll or have some other problem, let us know. We’re just testing this out and will probably end up working out some bugs.